I am a real stickler about having my computer protected with both anti-virus software and a personal firewall. As a result I have been running the Trend Internet Security product for a couple of years now. It is quite affordable, configurable and has been very reliable up until recently. When I decided to upgrade to Windows Vista, Trend was a royal pain to setup, and their support was utterly useless. More recently, I started having problems with Trend, because apparently I had too many application rules. However, removing rules didn’t seem to fix the problem and their support was dreadful. Dreadful to the point that I started investigating other options. My Trend subscription is up for renewal in a couple of months and I’ve had enough. After much research and testing I decided upon Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0. It received extremely high ratings from every review I read, and passed all standard anti-virus tests with the greatest of ease.
I always had a suspicion that the Trend software was really degrading my computer’s performance, and now I had the perfect chance to test that theory. So I timed my boot sequence from the power button until I was at my desktop and ready to roll. Here are the average test results after a couple of boots with each setup:
Trend: 2:30
Nothing: 1:20
Kaspersky: 1:30
Yes, you read that right. I shaved 60 seconds off my boot time, and I get a product that works properly on Windows Vista. Trend, you seem to be driving down the same road that Norton is… Suck Street. Goodbye forever Trend, hello my new friend, Kaspersky!
September 22nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Hi Jon, just wanted to ask if you’d ever tried NOD32 by Eset, I’ve used it for years because of it’s small footprint and general system impact.
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Thanks for the heads up. I did a bunch of reading before settling on Kaspersky, and it seemed to be the most effective at detecting viruses (hard to prove) and seemed to be one of the quickest as well, according to cnet:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6600_7-6655968-1.html
I haven’t purchased my full license of Kaspersky yet though, so I’ll NOD32 a try before I do.
Thanks!
September 24th, 2007 at 11:13 am
AVG seems to do a good job too… see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html
September 27th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I’d like to give a shout out to my friend Freddy for introducing me to Blink Personal Edition. Blink is the most comprehensive anti-virus software I’ve ever seen, and believe me I’ve tried more than a few handfuls. The spyware and malware threats have been wiped out and I’m free from things like data file theft and identity theft.
I’ve seen many of you complain about the anti-virus programs you use and would tell you to give Blink a fair shake. It’s great and it’s a free Antivirus Software download so you don’t have to worry about paying for it. Give it a shot and watch what it does to viruses and spyware which of course we all hate.