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MWE
10-11-2006, 11:32 AM
I have been running McAfee's suite of crummy tools for about a year (came installed on the computer). It was time to renew and I decided to look elsewhere based on personal experience and reviews in the pc mags. I am running Symantec/Norton on other computers with mixed success. They are functionally OK but seem prone to self destruction and need for reloads. For spyway and such, I have tried just about every product and am happiest with EWIDO. Webroot's SpySweeper seems to take over my system completely every 4 or 5 minutes and Windows Defender (was Giant s/w) is not particully effective. So, based on available reviews, I narrowed it down to BitDefender and ZoneAlarm and will probably continue to use EWIDO for spy stuff. One IT person I know (who really seems to know his stuff) recommends no suite and suggests a collection of individual tools: the use of the Windows Firewall, AVG for virus, etc. So,

1) what experience do folks have with BitDefender. Based on 3 weeks of trials, I have seen no problems with their firewall or antivirus. Their Spam tool is a mess. Their spyware tool (or maybe its the virus checker) keeps complaining about VBA macros. Their customer support is typical. LiveChat is reasonably effective but each more difficult problem that was supposed to initiate an email exchange seems to have died. email to customer support generates no replies.

2) what experience do folks have with ZoneAlarm. I read great things about their firewall but the rest of their suite gets mixed reviews. I am about the download a trial version to gain some experience.

Ken Puls
10-11-2006, 02:45 PM
Personally, I have the following setup:


At work:
-Hardware firewall, so run no software ones.
-Spyware software includes SpyBot, AdAware and SpywareBlaster. In addition
-AV consists of Symantec corporate on the desktops and servers, and all incomming email is scanned by a third party called MXLogic, with 3 different virus engines.
-Spam is handled by that same 3rd party. It has a very low amount of false positives (thought they happen), and a very low amount of false negatives either.

At home:
-Hardware firewall, but also run Windows Firewall
-Spyware software is the same as above
-AV software is the same (have a corporate license for the family business)
-Spam is handled by SpamAssassin as well as by our ISP's agents. Low false positive, high false negative rates.

I've used Zonealarm's firewall in the past, and it's a good product. I moved to the hardware router though, to get the firewall off my PC. I've always used Symatec's AV, as I prefer it over all others, but will not use their total suite though, as I found it unstable.

MWE
10-27-2006, 09:04 AM
Personally, I have the following setup: ...

At home:
-Hardware firewall, but also run Windows Firewall
-Spyware software is the same as above
-AV software is the same (have a corporate license for the family business)
-Spam is handled by SpamAssassin as well as by our ISP's agents. Low false positive, high false negative rates.

Ken: how are you using SpamAssassin? on a hardware device before your PC, on the PC but before the email tool or as part of the email tool (e.g., SpamAware or SpamArrow). The effort behind the SpamAssassin project is impressive and the stats are equally impressive. But, I have not found an Outlook "plugin" based on SpamAssassin that works very well for ol2K Both SpamAware and SpamArrow have lots of bugs and most menu picks do not do what they are supposed to do.

MWE
10-27-2006, 09:24 AM
an update on my exploration of "protection" stuff:

I have completed my evaluation of BitDefender. There appear to be too many problems with this suite at this time (at least for me). As mentioned previously, the AntiSpam tool is not very useful and the AV/AS tools are too sensitive to VBA stuff. Customer service seems to take a long time to respond (at least a week per issue) and, finally, the drain on my system was huge. I did the test on a Dell9100 (3 GHz dual core processor, 2GB Ram, 320 GB RAID array) and BitDefender had a significant impact; there were times when I really thought my system was infected. When I was running McAfee, there was no perception that anything was going on in the background. As soon as I removed BitDefender, performance was back to "amazing".

So, on this "test" system, I am presently running a mix of applications, each of which is well regarded: AVG for A/V, AVG's new anti spyware tool (was ewido) and Windows firewall. In the 2 weeks I have been running AVG s/w, I have been impressed. It seems rock solid, unobtrusive, nicely configurable and fast. I still plan to look at Zone Alarm, particularly its firewall, but since I have a h/w router I am a little less concerned about firewall protection than it I were plugged directly in nasty space. I am exploring Spam tools. Spam is not a big deal on my home systems, but I do some engineering consulting and when I VPN into other email systems ... well, let's just say that they are spamtastic. Why they do not install a SPAM filter upstream is an interesting story. I would like to find one based on SpamAssassin that does what it is supposed to do:banghead: I may be a bit handicapped as I m running ol2K and appl developers are not very interested in mods to their code to fix ol2K "features". Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Finally, take a look at the AVG antispyware tool. It found several dozen items that SpyBot, AdAware and SpySweeper in total did not find.

Ken Puls
10-27-2006, 10:26 AM
Ken: how are you using SpamAssassin? on a hardware device before your PC, on the PC but before the email tool or as part of the email tool (e.g., SpamAware or SpamArrow).

I have my family domain and my personal business domains hosted by a third party. SpamAssassin is run directly on their servers.

I actually just changed hosts, so have reconfigured the rules to only tag, and not delete, suspect email. (Want to confirm that false positive rate.) It's not doing too badly, but once the deletion is enabled, it will filter mail at the server level so that I never have to download it.

:)