A network administrator I work with recommended this program to me, antivir personal edition, that's another german product, I wasn't sure what to think, but I just ran it on two machines that had expired Norton Antivirus subscriptions, and I'm not a particular norton AV fan to begin with, Norton has gotten really bloated in the last few years, really bogs the system down.

Important: Make sure you fully uninstall any current antivirus software you have installed before installing another Antivirus program, uninstall, reboot, then install.

Don't blame us if you fail to do this and your system become unstable or fails... Expert users of course can ignore this advice since they know how to deal with the possible conflicts.

So I uninstalled Norton, ran the Antivir installer, it's a very small program, clean and lightweight, no junk, then the test, I ran antivirus scans, it found buried in a zipped downloaded file of questionable origin I've kept around for a while, several items, deleted 3, this is something Norton had never found.

Then I ran it on my oldest PC, a laptop, and it found an old but not used backdoor program in my Winnt folder, again, that had been scanned many times by Norton, and it never found it.

So looks like the Network admin knew what he was talking about... thanks Andy : )

Antivir isn't flashy and Gui heavy like Norton or MacAfee are now, but that stuff is just extra junk that gets in the way of the software, sort of like Windows XP does.

anyway, I'll keep you all posted, but so far looks nice, I changed some of the configuration settings, but it was pretty decent right away, didn't need much configuration.

So running this and SpyBot, both free to non business users, gives you a nice one-two punch, why do these people do nice things like this for free? Don't know, but do something nice yourself for free and maybe you'll figure it out....
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I've used Antivir, and while it is a good lightweight antivirus program, it has some drawbacks, like every month or so you have to download the whole updated program version.

I've been leaning more towards AVG free Antivirus. It's got an interesting interface, and has very small update sizes, very well suited for users on dialup. And doesn't have the problem with downloading a full new version ever month or so just to keep your AV upto date.

Give AVG a try, I think you might like it. It's at least equal to Norton or MacAfee, if not superior. It definitely doesn't bog your computer down nearly as much, nothing like that moment you install Norton on a fresh Operating system and watch it slow down significantly, never to recover.
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