Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
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Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#2Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#3Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.
Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#4Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software. Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
It uses 6 megabytes of memory
1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.
2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#5From what I"ve seen based on the number of customers we have who bring in computers so riddled with viruses that they won't function (about 500 so far this year in a town of 15k people), it's dangerous to rely on Symantec, because about 90% of those computers have Norton anti-virus installed on them. The rest are McAfee or nothing. I've never seen a computer with a free antivirus program like AVG or Avast as badly infected.... not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't see it. My guess is that a lot of people who know enough to hunt down free antivirus software probably no enough to fix their computer when something does happen.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#6Symantec is in my list of top 4 worst software manufacturers in the world along with Intuit, Hewlett-Packard, and Adobe. I would never -- ever -- trust my computer to Symantec.
Their software is bloated, it's buggy, it believes it owns your computer and it fails at doing what it is supposed to do.
Choose AVC or ClamWin and only download and install software from trusted sources. Disable autoplay.
It's just like the real world, avoid dangerous sources. If you have sex with random people and don't protect yourself, you're more likely to get a biological virus too.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software. Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
It uses 6 megabytes of memory 1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap. 2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.
You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.
Still pretty tiny.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#8Standard executive talk. He's oblivious to the fact that many of the free offerings have higher detection rates than his companies products while at the same time have a much smaller footprint than any product they will ever make.
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software. Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
Higher detection rates just means more false positives.
Or better detection of viruses.
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#9I'm not a Windows guy and I can't confirm this, but my windoze-guru friends always say one thing to people asking for advices:
don't install Symantec products
Re: Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus
#10I find it funny, especially when Symantec is usually in the bottom half of every antivirus banchmark made, surpassed easily by antivirus like Avira or Avast.