NAV 2005 Or Comcast Offer For McAfee VS9

I just upgraded to NAV 2005 about a month ago. So I have time to get a refund if I choose. I had an old copy of NAV 2003 laying around. Upgrade price is $29.95. I'm a Comcast HSI customer and I was checking Comcast's homepage. I don't use it, so I don't go there very often. I discovered that they are offering McAfee VS9 to Comcast customers for only $29.95 for a one year subscription. Looks like a pretty good deal to me. If it weren't for that offer, I wouldn't even be posting this.

I hate asking this question but,with the prices being equal and you had to choose between the two, which would it be and why?

I'm a little disappointed with the way McAfee for the way they first announced that they were going to daily updates and then it turns out it's only for Enterprise users. But that's another topic.

My OS is XP Home/SP2. Old 700Mhz computer 448RAM.

 

Wow. In my opinion, that is a win, win situtation, two excellent choices. My voice is a minority in this forum, because I like Norton and Norton is not very well liked, although I don't know how many of the Norton haters have actually tried Norton2005. If you look here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/
under the Feb.2005 test, you will see that they are just about dead equal. I can say this: I have personally tired both McAfee9.0 and Norton2005 and prefer Norton. The reason is twofold: the updating worked much better and easier, and it did not slow down my system like McAfee did (yes, Norton was the faster). But to repeat myself, these are both excellent choices and I would still be quite happy with McAfee if I had to use it. Good luck with your decision.

Acadia

 

Yeah I'm pretty impressed with the way NAV 2005 runs on my computer. You read lots of horror stories about how it slows computers down to a crawl, but I haven't noticed anything like that. I think that I'll stay with NAV 2005. I've had very good luck with NAV over the years. No need to go thru the uninstalling one product, installing another, and possible uninstalling that one if I don't like it. Too much of a hassle to me.

Thanks Arcadia.

Piper

 

I would recommend you McAfee, because their detection and hereustics are better then NAV... But it's your choice... If you like NAV, take it... If you want better protection choose McAfee... It's up to you...

 

The Norton bloat is breath-taking. Since I actually enjoy using my computer for something besides a virus scanner, I would choose McAfee.

 

Doesn't McAfee have an new scanning engine in the works? Depending on how this new engine turns out, McAfee may keep you on the cutting edge of scanning technology.

 

McAfee has some great technology and continues developing it, that's certainly true, however the consumer side seems to lag the corporate side by about six months in releasing that technology - this was true implementing the 4400 engine and looks to be true with implementing daily updates now. It might be more accurate to say that retail customers are on the tail end of that cutting edge technology.

 

Uh oh. Maybe I shouldn't be too quick with my decission. Maybe I should think this over a little more.

 

Like I said, you are in a win, win situation. (I also said that this is basically a hate Norton forum, I can direct you to a love Norton, hate McAfee forum if you want, I'm serious)

Acadia

 

I you want to buy one, and are not in a big hurry here is a search of eBay. I have bought two NAV through eBay in the past with good results, and the prices are less than half retail.
http://search.ebay.com/Anti-virus_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8

FWIW.
Jerry

 

No thanks Acadia. I don't like reading posts that go on and on bashing certain AVs. I know Norton, and McAfee to a certain extent, take hits here and on other forums also. I guess they are easy targets and everyone has their opinions.

said by bellgamin

I've never had any problems with NAV slowing down my computer. I know a lot of people complain about that though. I guess I'm just lucky.

I think what I'm going to do is go with the Comcast offer and run McAfee for a few days. McAfee has a 30 day refund policy. If I don't like it, I stay with NAV.

 

Sounds good. I can vouch for the fact that McAfee makes it easy to get your money back. I had to wait 15-20 minutes on the phone but once I got thru I had my refund in minutes, no hassle. Good luck.

Acadia

 

Speak for yourself. That has never been my experience with NAV.

 

Hello bellgamin,

If I'm not mistaken, you run WinME. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

Up until a few months ago, I dual booted ME with XP: the ineffiency of ME's handling of memory compared to XP's is "breathtaking".

Regards - Charles

 

Tuuu truue. Even so, if you were to slice Norton in half, it would still be two of the most bloated AV's on the planet.

I used to write games for the old Commodore 64 (back when 64K was a lot of ram, & floppies held a whopping 144K). Ergo, I continue to admire compactly programmed software (such as BOClean, NOD 32, & DrWeb) & have the opposite feeling toward those bloated pigs which, if they don't run well on your computer, those pigs says it's the fault of your computer.

 

Bellgamin, I hope that you never recommend GData's AVK, double the size of NAV: 50mb.

Acadia

 

Hi bellgamin,

Actually I agree with you, which is why I never upgraded NAV2002 on my original XP installation.

I substituted another XP install for the WinME and am running NOD on it.

I'm going to have to do something about replacing NAV2002 when the sub runs out in May - don't want two NOD's running; since I'm dual booting, want the advantage of cross-checking.

I've read that NAV2005 is a lot better in this respect - perhaps Randy Bell can comment.

Regards - Charles

 

Screenshot of main processes, Windows XP-SP2. "Ccapp.exe" is the "common client" which runs email and autoprotect. There are a few other processes but they don't use much RAM.

 

Hi Acadia. I see from your quote above that you used to run McAfee. Did you go from NAV to McAfee and back to NAV, or was it just McAfee to NAV? Was it VS9? What didn't you like about McAfee?

 

Hi, Piper. I went from NAV2004, to McAfee9.0, to NAV2005; note that the NAV versions changed from 2004 to 2005. Two things made me leave McAfee, but by the way, I could go back to it if I had to and would still recommend it to anyone wanting to try it, but then again if you follow my posts here at Wilders, I like all the AV and believe them all to be good products. Anyway, I left McAfee over two issues, one relatively minor, and the other a little bit more bothersome to me. The minor one, McAfee was having trouble updating the weekly virus signatures when I purchased it, a lot of folks were having problems and this is reflected in the McAfee help forum; there are many threads there to that affect. This may have been fixed by now, I don't know. This is minor to me because this is something that McAfee would HAVE to fix or they'd be in big trouble. The more bothersome one was the fact that it noticeably slowed my system down a little and this really surprised me because I have a fairly fast, modern system and because I had been using NAV2004 for eight months prior to this, but McAfee was a little bit TOO much in the slowdown department. So I went back to NAV but this time 2005 ... ZOOM, I couldn't believe the speed increase over both McAfee and NAV2004. I believe that many of the Norton bashers in this forum have never tried 2005. I want to emphasize that I could still recommend McAfee to anyone wanting to trial it; I hope that I never stoop to slam dunking any true security software. Good luck.

Acadia

 

I agree that 2005 is an improvement over 2004 and I also like the Worm Blocking feature. Anyone with some experience with Kerio, NPF/NIS, LooknStop, Outpost, etc. -- that is, some experience with rules creation and rules-based firewalls -- can "tweak" the Worm Blocker since it is just a "Mini" version of the Norton firewall. I now have it where it can stealth my PC even without the Windows firewall or my main firewall ZA Pro {ZAP} running. They {NAV Worm Blocker and ZAP} complement each other and provide layered protection, especially since the Worm Blocker adds some IDS {again borrowed from NIS technology} which ZAP does not have.

Very well said. I personally have no problems with anyone calmly stating he had certain issues with some security software; it is when someone goes beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and says "Product-X Sucks"; or "I will NEVER have any software from Vendor-X on my Box EVER again"; that I recoil in mild objection to such unnecessary visceral rhetoric.

One can make one's point, even to make a negative point, without becoming visceral and "bashing". Like the Supreme Court Justice said about porn, "It's hard to define but I know it when I see it", so "bashing" is hard to define but we all know it when we see it.

Thanks Acadia, for an excellent post!

 

Interesting. PCmagazine said that they scored almost perfectly on Gibson's ShieldsUp using only NAV2005:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1646466,00.asp

Acadia

 

Both of these programs give great protection. Both of them can be absurdly difficult to uninstall for people not using Total Uninstall.

An AV that gives weak protection is "shame on me" if I buy it. But an AV with grossly inadequate uninstall is definitely *shame on THEM* -- I tend to get really ballistic with any program that sins greatly in this respect.

 

I understand how you feel, you had a negative experience. And from reading your previous post, it sounds like you are running ME. The newer versions of Norton software run better in NT-based O.S. {particularly, XP} than in older 9X/ME O.S. They are tailored for newer systems without a doubt.

Also, for anyone reading this: all Norton software uses the Microsoft Windows Installer:

1. Windows Installer 2.0 Redistributable for Windows 95, 98, and Me
2. Windows Installer 2.0 Redistributable for Windows NT 4.0 and 2000.

It helps if one installs and uninstalls in as "clean" an environment as possible, without any unnecessary processes running in the background. That is what I always try to do: use MSConfig or my favorite Startup Manager to disable everything but the minimum required startup programs, then reboot to a "clean" environment to do the install. Just a suggestion for others to consider, you might have better success with the software if done in a "clean" environment.

Warmly, Ran

 

Thanks to Randy and Acadia for your comments.

As you can probably tell, I'm leaning torwards NAV2005.

bellgamin, I do have TU, so not appehensive in that respect. And have SSM to stop any NAV process I don't like, which is what I do now - no interest in having LU and it's associated processes running all the time.

Regards - Charles