Nod32 license expires on the 18th; former NOD users, what did you go to and why?

I've searched on just about everything here and have been using / recommending this forum for months. I'm just after some personal opinion on this.

For those of you that formerly used Nod32 (either trial or for a year or two) and switched to something else, what did you go to and why?

I ask because my year-long license for Nod32 expires on August 18th. I am currently an undergrad student (semester starts the following week), so I can certainly get the $20/$30 one-year/two-year discount for Nod32. Save for not liking the UI very much, I have never had a problem with this AV besides a false positive in a mIRC script that was eventually fixed.

I suspect that I will be waiting for the AV-comparative results on September 1st before purchasing anything, but I'm interested in what former NOD32ers have to say.

Just about anything is a choice, really - SAV, KAV, F-Sec, Nod32, BD, whatever. If any other products have a student discount that I am not aware of, please let me know.

(Currently using BD8 free for second opinions, Kerio 4, Win Defender, Spybot, and playing with Ewido and SAS)

 

I´ve been using NOD32 for 3 years. It has worked well. But lately it started grinding my harddrive continuously and I had no clue of why. I was about to reinstall it when I realized I had just a couple of months left of my subscription. I just wanted to try out something new so I tried a couple of AV´s bitdefender and Drweb. Bitdefender was very good, but had some issues with Firstdefence on my machine. Drweb has about the same impact on the resources as NOD32 so I ended up buying Drweb after their 20 day trial.

Yeah, I know Drweb doesnt win all the virustests and its full disc scans are alot slower, but I liked the silence of my harddrive I find it very, very difficult to get infected with anything anyway ( according to my HIPS and NOD32) so even if Drweb´s theoretical lesser detection abilities should be true, I have other programs that will warn if something suspicious happens. And I never liked the high price of NOD32 license renewals.

 

ive used nod32 for a year or two and i recently started using KAV 6 (MP1 beta).

the reason for the switch is that KAV offers greater detection rates and it runs reasonly light too.

in addition, if i didnt use Prevx1, KAV's proactive defense would be handy.

 

I am posting here after a long time....

Anyway, I have just now renewed my license for NOD32 for one more year. Its been an year since I have been using it... and its the only AV which is installed on my laptop....

Can't think of installing any other AV...

Cheers

 

I had NOD32 for two years and I liked it very much on 98SE because it was lighter than any other AV and got along great with that OS. I left when the HTTP scanner was introduced because it drastically slowed my internet speed and my license had only four months left anyhow.

I moved to Bit Defender free (on demand scanner only) for two years. I had no resident scanner during this period. I liked BD enough to finally get BD 9 Pro which I really liked until the forced upgrade to 9.5. That version gave me BSODs and other very serious problems on my XP Pro SP2 box. I worked with support for quite some time and nothing they told me to do stopped the BSODs. Finally they had me send Belarc Advisor scan to them and they saw I had Spybot and Spyware Blaster. I was using Spybot on demand only (no TeaTimer). BD support informed me that I had to immediately remove both Spybot and Spyware Blaster as they were not compatible with BD and they were the reason I had the BSODs involving a Bit Defender driver. I removed Bit Defender rather than give up Spybot and Spyware Blaster.

I was beta testing KIS 2006 on a virtual machine during these problems with BD on the host machine. I liked KIS 2006. I now use KAV 2006 (decided I didn't need the extra things in KIS) and I am very happy with it.

 

Switched to KAV, had a horrible system slow-down and KAV disabled itself and gave no warning.

Bought a new license of NOD32 and am running Bitdefender free (on-demand) as a backup.

 

I agree.

My NOD32's license expired last month.
Since october, I'm a Kaspersky Internet Security beta tester and fan.

 

Migrated to Vba32.
I had NO issues with NOD32. It's about the best there is with respect to efficacy, modest use of system resources.
Just wanted to try something different in a "not very high risk" environment.
Plus, it's small money (took advantage of multiple license discounts).

They offer no student discount that I'm aware of, but if you can coerce 6-10 dorm buddies to subscribe, licenses are only $13 each.

 

I went to Dr.Web because I can't exclude my FirstDefense snapshots from NOD's manual scanner. I hope that becomes an option in ver 3.


@veri

You mentioned that you are an Undergrad student... You should check to see if your school offers free security software for Faculty and Students. My school provides Mcafee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i and Kerio firewall for free.

 

Namor, does the Dr Web exclude now work with FD?

 

I used my current Nod32 license to migrate to DrWeb. DrWeb updates flawlessly, Nod32 update, is hit or miss, mostly miss. Eset has serious server update issues. DrWeb is a solid av program in my opinion, Nod32 is finicky and exhibits quirky behavior from time to time, like the nod32 kernal service on occasion would not load on start up, I had to manually start the service. Have yet to figure out why it did that, and there were other things about this software that annoyed me, but these two issues were the biggest reasons for my premature departure from Nod32. In my opinion, Nod32 is not a polished software and has room for much improvement, I do not like having to baby sit my av product, but with Nod I had too, whereas, DrWeb seems more matured as a software, once installed, it keeps itself updated without incident, running quitely in the background without a need for me to check on it daily. I just trust DrWeb more than Nod32 after running both of these programs. It's all about comfort and I feel comfortable with my present choice.

Marc

 

If you leave the update server set to automatic selection, you should not experience any problems. If there's a problem connecting to a specific server, NOD32 will try to get updates from another one. Unfortunately, the next successful update is not logged if no newer update is available, so if you see some connection errors in the log it might give you impression that update is not reliable though NOD32 was actually able to connect to an update server.

As for the problem loading the kernel service, I haven't heard of such from our clients so far, maybe from 1 out of several millions. In the event of an issue, you should contact ESET's technical support who will be happy to assist you in resolving it.

 

Thanks for your advice Marcos, several users in the nod support forum tried to assist me with the update problems I was experiencing, they gave good suggestions and recommendations, but none worked to my satisfaction and the kernal service problem happened two or three times in two months, uninstalled and re-installed the software several times, once on a freshly wiped and formatted drive, I felt Nod required to much maintenance and attention to keep it running properly. In the past month I have tried several of the top tier av solutions, many of them I think are over rated, out of the lot, etrust EZ Antivirus and DrWeb were the two that performed best for me, DrWeb ended up my choice, I'm comfortable with that and feel well protected. Thanks again, for your concern. I appreciate all the help I received while using Nod, but it's just not the av solution for me.

 

You're positive of this? I discovered I had days worth of failed updates, and all NOD32 ever told me on an attempted manual update was that no update was necessary. I then switched to a specific server and it immediately grabbed an update.

If you're right it was just down to my timing, but since then I've not dared switch it back to automatic (after I found a server that's been rock solid for weeks at a stretch now).

 

To All:

I'll ask that We follow the above advice to contact Eset for support and concern ourselves with AV's other than Nod32 in this thread and other anti-virus software forum. It's only fair given Nod32 support can be had here in their respective Official Forum.

Thanks,
Bubba

 

I trialed NOD on both computers, and liked it so well I almost did not trial KAV6. However, when I did I liked KAV better. It scans faster after the first scan if you scan only new or changed files, and is at least as light as NOD. I had long admired the on demand detection rates of KAV.

I chose KAV, and am happy with it. I only have it on my desktop, and on my laptop have trialed F-Secure and now Avira. I like both.

I prefer Avira and would select it over NOD, and consider it equal to KAV. Based on the price, I will probably keep it after the trial period.

Now, having said that, if you are happy with NOD and can get a discount that makes it cost less than either KAV or Avira, then I would keep NOD. It is a first class AV, and you will be as secure with it as with any other. It ran well on both my machines.

If you want to trial a couple then go for Avira, and KAV6, and see how they go.

Best,
Jerry

 

thats my problem i like boht antivir and kaspersky and cant decide.

both nice interfaces.

kaspersky has more custom options.

i think i will wait till kaspersky mp1 and antivir suite then try em both
seprately of course lol

 

KAV 6.
Mostly out of curiosity, trialed it, liked it, bought the license key for the year.

However I'm back to NOD32 on my new PC and will stay put with this AV, currently in my second year with NOD.

So I have two PC's running with NOD on one and KAV on the other

 

i like the idea of the startup scan on kaspersky and the fast scan after first one because then i would run it alot more if it only took say 10minutes

 

The thing about Kasperskys Antivirus is rich in useful features compared to others. Heck, the AV is almost a suite and they will have hueristics later this year. Nod, nope.

One other product to try- Trends Micro Antispyware.

 

Are you trying to say that NOD32 does not use heuristics?

 

trjam i prefer counterspy

 

No, he's saying Kaspersky will have better heuristics later this year.

 

No I was saying Nod wasnt even a choice. I realize it has hueristics.

 

Update:

I've been running NOD32 as main shield and Bitdefender/KAV (via AVK) + Antivir PE as on-demand backup scanners.

Since my last post about a month ago, I've had three instances where NOD32 has missed a virus (each one a different virus), but AVK and AntivirPE have caught them.

I haven't had anything happen the other way around (NOD finds, AVK/AntiVir don't).

I know it's purely anecdotal, but is has made me consider NOD32 as my main active on-guard AV/worm shield.

I was almost ready to start using AVK as my main one, but the fact that AVK will go Avast+KAV engines in 2007, instead of the current Bitdefender+KAV engines has convinced me otherwise.

I wish AV comparatives would tally "total combined defense so far" statistics, showing which two products combined would historically miss the least amount of virii/worms/trojans. That kind of information would be very valuable to those of us running an on-guard shield + a separate on-demand backup scanner.