SillyDog701

[James]

My Norton Security Suite is about to lapse. Renewing it for $60 seems a bit excessive. My ISP provides a free suite (F-Secure...not sure whether it's 2010 or 2011). This seems like a reasonable way to go. Other possibilities: MSE and Windows 7 firewall; Avast and Win7 firewall, AVG and Win7 firewall. All of these are the "free" alternatives.

Paid for: ESET Nod 32, BitDefender are two that strike me as reasonably good alternatives to Norton.

I would renew Norton since it has presented no issues for me, but I'm put off by the ridiculous renewal price.

Suggestions?

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[Antony]

Would your Norton Security Suite still work without subscription? (Apart from no new definition.)

If so, you should still be fine without the latest definition for a while, just know what you are doing.

To me, I am too cheap to pay for the subscription for Virus Barrier (well, you know that Antony is poor). And I know that from time to time, there will be bundles/promotions of new Virus Barrier which comes with one year subscription. And the bundled price is always cheaper than the one year subscription cost.

As for the Windows (virtual machines) I have under Parallels Desktop for Mac, I don't have anti-virus/security suite installed on most of them, and only Microsoft's free one on one.

I think I shall let Windows users to comment on anti-virus applications.

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[Don_HH2K]

If so, you should still be fine without the latest definition for a while, just know what you are doing.

I'd have to disagree with this - the vast majority of times I've had to clean up peoples' computers from viruses, it's either been because they were running without AV protection, or they let their subscription lapse. Most computer vendors nowadays give you a 30-day trial, and people don't seem to understand they need to actually buy the product (or install something else entirely) once the 30 days are up.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110820 Firefox/6.0-x64 PaleMoon/6.0-x64

[James]

Thanks, Guys. I decided against ponying up another $60 just to renew and instead chose to install the free security suite from my ISP which carries three license keys (one for my laptop, one for my desktop and one for my wife's computer). The suite as mentioned before is made my F-Secure, a well-known and respected security company in Finland. It appears to be functioning perfectly so we shall see how this all works out. And the thing is: it's free so if there's any issues, I'll just try another. Thanks again.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)