I'll share.
In 2000, I'd moved back to So-Cal, bringing my computers with me from Virginia. I had network subscription for McAfee, and they were offering me update bargains i couldn't refuse.
Then, in 2002, I get an e-mail with a suspicious attachment from San Bernardino County offices. Only person I knew who had contact with that county was my friend, a retired SB Deputy Sheriff who still worked part-time as a firearms instructor. I sent him an e-mail, and his response was "He-e-ellp Meeee!!" He had the Klez virus, and all sorts of other assorted problems, and I must've given three work-days to unravel his system.
But what really irked me was that McAfee hadn't caught that e-mail attachment as a Klez infection, and the only reason I didn't infect my system was because I've been pretty savvy about this business for going on three decades.
The only time I ever caught a virus before happened when I worked for the gov in DC, and somebody brought me a 5.25" disk of files down from the Asst Sec'y for Management's office -- it gave my system the "Stoned" virus. In my "other career," I taught CS and database courses at a small university with a large number of Chinese students, who would return from the holidays every January spreading cold and flu as well as computer viruses all over the school. I'd set things up so that the student disks I took home never got infected, and my home-office systems were safe. I still had to buy cough medicine and Thera-Flu, but my computers were uninfected.
We checked "Consumer Reports" to find an alternative to McAfee, and I should've done the leg-work myself and done some web-searches for CNET, ZDNET and other reviews, but I let CR be the guideline. It recommended Norton. I'd used Norton before; I was even fairly impressed with the earlier Norton software from the 1990's, even before Symantec bought it up.
But all along, I KNEW that Norton leaves traces of itself in the system registry if you go to uninstall it. My lawman-friend had been using an expired version of it, and I had to do at least a partial cleanup before a new license would even install on his system.
My brother and Sis-in-law began using it because I was using it. Eventually, we all had troubles. If a download of virus-definitions failed during an update, it would leave the system in an awful mess. And I became very suspicious when -- among the extended family -- about two months before subscriptions expired, these sorts of things would happen. And they would happen just when newer versions were being offered all around with rebates. We started getting into the habit of skipping the subscription renewals in favor of just updating the software.
I had hardware AND software troubles on my last (pet) computer, initially attributing it to Norton, and again, when uninstalling it, it left traces all over the system registry and the Program Files, user-profile Local-Settings and Application files -- just all over the place.
More recently, re v 2007, I'd got a 3-user license as a fall-back for an after-rebate price of about $15. I was moving our systems here to Kaspersky and an experimental "evaluation" of Bit-Defender -- latter in a 2-user license. I discovered that after uninstalling Norton and cleaning things up for what I thought was a thorough job, the G$*D*m LiveUpdate program was still on there, and it was interfering with both Bit-Defender and my registry management program. IT WAS STILL GOING OUT ON THE WEB AND ATTEMPTING TO UPDATE NORTON, after I'd done a regular uninstall and cleaned up the hard disk and registry!!
Many of my friends across the country have migrated to Kaspersky; Bit-Defender is highly rated also; my brother was using Trend-Micro and swore by it. But a firm in Israel and some other online sources had done some evaluations of AV and firewall software, which we were able to look at. They put Windows LiveOne Care and Symantec Norton at the bottom of the ratings for "robustness, thoroughness and reliability." Kaspersky and Bit-Defender were near the top. Part of the reason they rated LiveOne and Norton so badly was an inability to detect mutating threats.
If you look at the Kaspersky manual, I think you'll be impressed. This is a Russian company which has now a division in the US. If someone asked about the drawbacks to their program, I'd say that a noobie or casual user without computer savvy might make bad decisions based on Kaspersky's pop-up alerts, because it can be easily enabled to examine just about every software program on your system and ask you whether or not to put it in a "trusted zone." And its alerts are a bit scary -- they carry an alarm that sounds like squirrel having its tail run over by a cement truck.
Other than that, I love it -- Da!! Multi-year licenses, multi-seat licenses, too.
But keep in mind that this part of the software industry attempts to meet a changing and fluid threat, so last year's rating may be eclipsed by new developments.
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