I support IT in some 264 schools and have recently completed a comparison of various AV's to replace the very crap Sophos we were already using. In the end we plumped for McaFee ASAP which is very very simple and this suited our clients and McaFee for our servers.
 
However we thoutght that Symantec Corporate was actually the better product and part of the discision in the end came down to price.
 
Personally I would recomend Norton 2003 for home use and Symantec Corporate in a windows server/cleint environment.
 
The other AV's we tried came nowhere near.
 
Some Call Me Tim

hmm see I found NAV 2003 to be so resource heavy and really a system hog everytime I try to use it. any other experiences?

I use AVG 6 and it's pretty good, the shield only uses 1.6 megs of ram.
I don't know about version 7 though.
 
Norton uses more RAM I think.

BTW, I don't recommend Avast. It f*cked up my two XP machines. After installation, I was having display problems and "No more quota" messages. Quota is not even enabled and there was at least 6 gigs free on both machines. After I removed that sh*t, every thing was back to normal....

Be careful with McAfee.............. we've used it here on our 40+ properties and yes it will tell you when a virus is detected , but will not (in most cases) clean it , delete it or quarantine it. Norton will at least shut down the "service" and do something with it.
 
I use AVG at home and like it a lot. I can't even catch a cold while it's running. :x

I've had much better luck with McAfee at all my other jobs than I have with Norton at this one. Even with current definitions, worms and such still seem to make it in. We are running 7.61 right now, and I was using McAfee 4.xx and 7.x Corporate Edition forever with no issues. The only thing I can figure is that we have so many users here that we are bound to trip over the holes in protection afforded by it.

Quote:hmm see I found NAV 2003 to be so resource heavy and really a system hog everytime I try to use it. any other experiences?

I have not found that to be the case on my notebook. It's running an mobile XP1500 with 256 MB RAM which is pretty low end by todays standards.

NAV is a resource HOG. Expect slowdowns of up to 15%. It's a great choice if you need idiot proof software. Zero user intervention is required for updates and it catches most stuff. It also unleashes a MONSTER to assure proper licensing.
 
McAfee is low impact, also runs seamless upgrades. version 5 is evil.
 
trend micro is very low impact but can be system intrusive installing crappy bits of firewall software even when the user chooses not to install the full product. registry hacking required to make it play nicely. not for the novice user. on occasion CPU spike to 100 on startup.
 
NOD is good on demand. there really is no cause to continuously run AV software if the user has a modicum of common sense. Surfing with an HTML proxy like, oh, say proxomitron or privoxy will cut out the need entirely. Again common sense will combat email threats as well. though I've mentioned Disruptor OL in another thread, http://disruptor.de , it's a plugin for Outlook. It has a cool feature called "secure" that converts HTML to text while retaining HTML formatting and layout (bye bye threats).
 
there are a few sites that rate the effectiveness of engines at spotting threats. My brain hurts now otherwise I could recall two or three.

I have used AVG 6 and liked it, as above have not used 7, have had quite a bit to do with AVG's free edition, lot of customers use it. Also have used F-prot, would not recommend it for a multi user/multiple login install, but like its interface as do I AVG's. AVG will detect a virus before most AV I have encountered, and cleans decently, F-prot cleans very nicely. My 2 cents...

Poeple say norton is a resource hog, but I tell you, Ive used 2001-2003, and corp 8, millions of times, and never see this enourmous processor hog inaction. Benchmarks while norton is off or on are quite nearly identical. (By off I mean totally shutting down the service, which kills the 20+ threads norton runs.
 
Norton has been so good to me I could not recommendd it highly enough.
 
When getting into the corp vversion, the price can get a little high, but not too bad.
The other nice thing about corp is it requires no rebooting and grabs ALL updatyes in one go, again with no rebooting.

I have become more exposed to Norton AV, as we use it where I work (Dept. of the Army) and we have many machines. I can say, without a doubt, that it can be a resource hog. Also, it doesn't appear to be as easy to deploy centrally as McAfee is via ePolicy Orchestrator, but it isn't that bad. We have also had viruses make it through despite being centrally managed and up to date, so it isn't perfect by any means. It seems to be alright in our mock-up test lab of our CONUS AD forest (about 22 servers) and it seems to work OK. Again, it isn't my favorite, but it's tolerable.