Virex or Norton Antivirus for Mac?

G

gphillipk

Registered
I know there aren't that many viruses that affect Macs, but I would like to be protected anyway since I regularly have to work with machines running Windows. Between Virex and NAV for Mac, which is the better product for virus protection?
 
I dislike all Norton products for mac. They are not lovely developed but rather quickly ported. I would recomment Virex, which is actually free for .Mac members.
 
"aren't that many viruses that affect Macs"

If you're using OS X, there are NONE. The only need for a Virus scanner would be to scan incoming attachments so that if you forward them on, they definitely don't have viruses.

However if you insist, Virex is quite OK. Although updating the virus definitions is ludicrously difficult.

My Uni gave students free copies on its license, so you might be in such luck.
 
You could always use ClamAV, which is a free and open sourced virus scanner. The Mac OS X version can be found here.
 
There are no unalloyed joys.

You have to have a .Mac account to get Virex as a "civilian." Unless
you buy a 5-pack. But I never had problems with updating Virex
defs. Don't use the built-in auto-updater. Just go to versiontracker
and download the defs file each month.

Norton's auto-scan has an interesting effect on PowerPoint 2004. You
can't save a presentation (with the same name) if autoscan is on.

ClamAV is free, and (my opinion) worth every penny. It is beastly slow
on my G4 867DP, it won't scan more than one volume or more than
one folder automatically, it doesn't scan downloads on the fly, and
there is no way I could find to see what exactly it protects against.
Other than that, I guess it's OK.
 
Norton has been known to cause more problems on MacOS than it claims to solve. MacOS is immune to all virii at the moment, and for the forseeable future. every threat has been unfounded. there is no need for Norton at all on your mac.

Virex has not been supported by Apple since Tiger, and is no longer bundled with .mac.

If you must have AV on your mac, (company reasons etc) i would reccomend ClamAV.
 
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