My software -
Antivirus:
I used Norton off and on for years. I was impressed with their software back in the DOS days when Peter Norton was running the show. Then he sold the product along with his smiling picture to Symantec, and we entered the Windows era. The software hooks in to the Windows operating system in sometimes nasty ways, and it did conflict with other software sometimes. In earlier versions of Windows it caused system crashes quite often. It was not a good community player - it wanted to own the show. It did, and still does, consume more system resources than it should. I have not put any Norton software on my system for a few years now, and it is going to stay that way.
McAfee started as shareware, and I used it for free for a long time. It was the best in its early years. I went back to it when I ditched Norton. At that point it was no longer free of course. Two years ago, they upgraded the software, and ruined it. It was constantly in my face. Like the little kid in class that constantly is waving their hand at the teacher and wiggling from head to toe whether they know the answer or not. They were no options to tell it to sit down and shut up. Got rid of it. McAfee called me to ask why, and I told them why. I just read a review of their current product and the reviewer said he could not understand why anyone would pay for software that irritating. So they weren't listening. They are history.
I went to Panda anti-virus last year. Excellent product. Automatic updates, sat there and did its job without bothering me unless there was something I really needed to know, and fairly fast with scanning. But it is very much like Suzuki. Great product, lousy support organization. Closed on weekends. Unfriendly website. Call during the week, and you'd get voicemail. Three or four business days later they'd get around to returning your call. And this was for sign-up & renewals issues - I wanted to give them money, they couldn't be bothered. It is also too expensive. $90 a year to protect 2 PCs in my house is way too much. I did not renew it this year.
I went to F-Prot this time, which Billmeek tipped me off to. It is not as nice as Panda, but it is good. And $29 to protect every PC in the household is a good deal. So far it has done nothing to irritate me, and its consumption of system resources is very low. A reasonably good solution I think.
Firewall:
I used the free version of ZoneAlarm at first. When I lived in Connecticut, it was intercepting a huge amount of traffic - sometimes hundreds of hits a day. When I moved to Nebraska, I installed home networking with a SpeedStream router. It has a hardware firewall. I still ran ZoneAlarm, but in three months it didn't have to intercept anything. The hardware firewall was effective. So I removed ZoneAlarm and rely on the hardware firewall.
Spyware:
I went with a Billmeek recommendation here. Spybot Search and Destroy, and SpywareBlaster. Both free. Good enough.
Pop-up Supression:
I tried a few of these - all free, all pretty good, none 100% effective. I now use the one provided with Service Pack II. Same deal, free, pretty good, not 100% effective. Good enough though, most pop-ups are suppressed.
Spam:
I went with the free service provided by my ISP (Cox). It fits the free, pretty good, not 100% effective model. It does trash the spam at the server end, which is better than downloading the spam and having something on my PC trash it. An item or two gets past it occassionally. I then send it as an attachment to
[email protected]. They evaluate it for future suppression. Good enough.
Backup:
There are few guarantees in life, but death, taxes, and hard drive crashes are pretty safe bets. You can cover all the bases above, but lose it all to a hard drive crash - and without a current backup you are back to square one. But few people bother with backups, and the software industry doesn't invest much effort in producing good backup software. They can make more money writing games and productivity software. With Windows in particular, it is difficult to find any backup software that is capable of backing up all files. They simply skip files that Windows has locked (for being in use). At its best, backing up a Windows system is going to take lots of time - and lots of media space. My Dell PC came with two huge hard drives. I run from the C: drive. About 3 times a year, when I get around to it, I use the old DOS xcopy command to copy the C: drive to the D: drive. Not nearly as fast as you'd think it would be, and it does skip those locked files, and it doesn't provide an audit report. Better than nothing, but not good enough.
So, if anyone has a really good backup approach, I'd like to hear about it. Restoring to the original image that came with the PC does not interest me. It took me a long time to delete all the unwanted junk that was preloaded on the PC, and to set up the software I do want. And most of my software source files are downloaded these days - even for purchased software. Those files, of course, are stored on my hard drive... So restoring my system from scratch would take days, and I never would get everything back without a current backup.