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Hello all IT professionals,
With your expertise, would you choose McAfee or Norton for your company's protection against virus? Why? Thank you very much for your time and your great help!!!
nh39.

I have run into the usual problems with both of the anti-virus. Both in networks and in stand-alone applications.
Both come with their own sets of problems.
I beleive it is the old "ford vs chev" thing.
I purchased my first copy of Norton anti-virus for dos back in the earlt 90's.
My first preference has always been Norton.
today I use neither, I use AVG in both networked and stand-alone environments.
Why? Cost. My IT department (30 'puters) has a very limit4ed budget. I inherited P2-P3's running '95a because the last guy ran on a shoestring and didnt like '98. But I digress, with cash I would go Norton.

I tried both norton and mcafee in the past as backup antivirus, but i prefer AVG. The only cons, is that AVG cannot update virus definition if not logged under administrator account.
Network administrator should first screen the email attachment received on the mail server prior to install antivirus on all workstations!!! Consider commercial antivirus as backup protection.

Back about 1998-99 I was working a lot of short term contracts...it seems everyone was using McAfee then...
After 2000, it seems everyone I run into is on Nortons...
Have no idea if Y2K has anything to do with it...BUT, in my current job, we support small networks, 25 users or less...
A few have McAfee installed, and we have had spool32 problems...After changing them to either NAV 2002 or NAVCE, spool32 went away...
I have a few customers that I think get every cotton-pickin' virus there is and I have a feeling that Norton does not always catch everything...and I am running 2, and in a couple of cases, 3 virus checkers on the same computer...
NAV, AVG, BitDefender, and Solo...are the ones I have been installing, but Norton goes on EVERYTHING, the others I use as "secondary" virus checkers...
Hope this "opinion" helps a little
Steve

Steve, I as well install virus protection on our client machines (usually small lans of 3-6 people). We have used McAfee in the past and after moving all of our inhouse machines to NAV, have done likewise with all of our client machines. NAV seems to slow machines down more than McAfee, but seems to clean and detect more reliably. The interface for the versions 6.x of McAfee really suck IMHO and their tech support at mcafee.com and nai.com really sucks! Symantec at least have a very comprehensive web site. One of the reasons we have abandoned McAfee are the spool32 errors, although they can happen with NAV, also. One of the fixes I have seen is to replace the Win98 spoolss.dll with the WinME spoolss.dll... perhaps, one of the few good uses for that whole mistake of an O/S.

my college uses McAfee. Even though files are updated every time a user logs on to the system, I don't know how many viruses have gotten through:) I use Norton on my personal computers.

NAV all the way. however they are dropping support for some of the old OS's so i am using Panda on the Win95 machines and so far i like it.

Norton or McAfee, NORTON!
But I would take SOPHOS over all. Cross platform, (Linux for me, Macintosh for some others and more) , excellent GUI centrallised management, super fast on access engine.

Thank you all very much for your helpful info. We're currently using McAfee anti virus, NetShield, and GroupShield. We got hit only once by the I Love You, so far, and we're quite satisfied. However, management is a different story, lately, since the last scan engine update. It changed some of the setting in the GroupShield.

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