I've not heard bad things about F-secure, and at £6 a year, it's a reasonable package (it costs £14 on Ebuyer). However (there is always a however
) the measure of a good AV program is not only how effective it is - it is also about how much load the program places on the computer, because it is a program, and it's running in the background all the time. Some AV programs place so much load on the PC that you can notice a big difference when you remove them - the computer becomes much more responsive. I use Eset Smart Security 4 - this isn't cheap at £39.95 a year, but I think the security of my personal data is worth that, and it does work better than other products. The package includes full firewalling, AV detection, heuristic threat detection, email scanning, and spyware detection. Eset uses "pre-compiled code" which basically means that it places a smaller load on the PC.
Eset Smart Security 4 only uses about 48MB of the computer's memory when running. In independent tests by AV-Comparatives.org (an independent Austrian research lab) Eset Smart Security and Eset NOD32 AV heuristic detection detected 68% of threats, compared to only 27% by AVG. And, in tests, Eset Smart Security and Eset NOD32 have
never let an "in the wild"* virus slip through, compared to 35 by Kaspersky, 71 by MacAfee, and a whopping 745 by AVG !
* An "in the wild" virus is a newly-released virus whose signature does not appear on any virus database. Virus checkers work in two ways - (1) they compare files against databases of known virus signatures (data strings), and (2) they analyse the virus to try to gauge if it is a threat - this is called heuristic checking.
