My ISP offers McAffee Internet Security 2012

[ruirib]

Well if we are throwing names around, Emsisoft has some great security products. Emsisoft Anti-Malware (Anti-Malware and AV) and Online Armor firewall. These are the active products that I run in my computers. The anti-malware product ranks recurrently at the top of comparative tests, regardless of what other products are part of the tests). OA is not only a network firewall, but also an OS firewall, that allows you to have control over what apps and components are allowed to run in your computer. Both are rather easy to use and quite unobtrusive.

I would steer well clear of McAffee. As far as I can tell, Norton's latest versions are much lighter and seem to be reasonably good, much better than the versions that got them a bad reputation.

[Medico]

I have to agree there. I used Norton back in the Win 95 days, perhaps into Win 98 (can't really remember the exact time) Kept getting more obtrusive until I said good-bye. Even though I have read it is better, I just don't bother anymore. There are just too many excellent free apps available.

The same thing holds true for McAfee. They have sunk so low in the reputation department, I suspect if they did not pay OEM's to include McAfee with new PC's, they would be in very poor shape. (Perhaps they still are). I know the large University my wife works for the IT department switched from McAfee to something else about a year ago. It seems McAfee has been big in Enterprise environments, although it appears that is changing as well.

The only AV that has a worse reputation from my ISP is CA (I think this is what it's called) that Road Runner used to offer. I see they have now switched to McAfee as well, but I will not install McAfee anywhere near my PC's.