Community weekly poll: Which antivirus utility protects your computer?

Had Vet, moving on.

In reply to: Which antivirus utility protects your computer? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

We had Vet AV for many years. Now they have their new version 11, it appears to have had a massive dumming down forced on it by Computer Associates to make it palatable for the home market. All the useful featuers, like settings for logging all the results, delete if you can't clean a file automatically. For example - a recent scan of the mail-server turned up 4 viruses in mail folders. There was no option to clean or remove the files. Ringing helpdesk, which used to ring the next suburb to talk to local support, took me to being on hold for 30 mins to India. The attendant who took the call then admitted that there was no way now to remove those viruses and I had to delete them by hand. I chose to remove only one thing by hand and that was Vet.

We're now profiling a range of other solutions. The price to buy a corporate license (~75 computers) is ferocious for a small business (~45 people). When you don't expect to have this as an expense this late in the year, paying $6K-$10K for an AV package is very hard to arrange.

The old Vet was nice and simple. Daily or better updates, reasonably resource-shy and ran in safe-mode for all the benefits that entails.

For now, we are doing a month-by-month evaluation across the company of the offerings from each company. We had good results with F-secure, although this is tricky to install on some computers (had to do it in safe mode more than once) and it won't run in safe-mode so when your computer is suffering from a virus and running very slowly, you have to wait for it to boot and run f-secure to identify what is killing it.

We are evaluating trend pc-cillin. The first problem was that it firewalled some, but not all of the network resources until you manually configure it be in an office LAN. It seems to be quick enough, although not startlingly so. It certainly has the best price quote so far for the big commercial names.

On the list to match up with it are f-prot, sophos and AVG. The ones we would never touch are the made-for-home market and anything with the Norton badge. The sad thing about Norton is the once great products are now surviving on reputation. A lot of the supporters in this list of Norton won't realise why Norton is bad nor what their computer can be like running other software. We all have plenty of battle stories regarding it's misdemeanours that convince us to go elsewhere.

Our mail is scanned by Messagelabs to guarantee it is all shielded long before it ever makes the domain. This saves huge amounts of time. We will also run our web-proxying through them for the same reason. They endorse McAfee as one of the best. We've had bad stories with customers using McAfee, particularly with false-positives to our software as a virus.

All I want is something that is quick, unobtrusive, reliable, able to be locked down so users can't deactivate it, updates automatically, mails the admins when there is a problem. Oh yeah, and it would be nice to be centrally monitorable too. And I don't want to have to pay 3 years at a time license to get the price down to something vaguely realistic. Is that too much to ask?