Arthur S

Consumer Reports Tests Net Security Products, Some Real Surprises.

I was especially surprised to see that their top rated Anti-Virus product was Trend Micro PC-cillin. With Norton AV in 4th place and McAfee in 6th place.

One salesman said PC-cillin would destroy my computer!

Then, I happened to notice that Hotmail uses Trend Micro as its E-Mail anti-virus program. I find that a tremendous endorsement of the product.

I just bought Norton AV, so I won't switch till next year. Amazon has PC-cillin for $40 and there should be a $25 rebate for upgrade or those who switch from another brand.

Other surprises (to me, of course), best antispyware:

Microsoft AntiSypware (beta) free at Microsoft.

Best secondary antisypware: SpySweeper by Webroot.

Best antispam: Built in to Outlook 2003; or Add-On:
Desktop by MailFrontier.

Being somewhat oblivious, I never heard of most of these top rated products.

I have downloaded the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta and it works nicely. I believe it will also be free when it is released in final.

What do you think of their findings?

Carl Miller

Trend Micro's online scanning utility has helped me out of a couple of jams where Norton failed miserably. So I'm not surprised they got a good rating. I use AVG though, and would be curious to know if AVG, Panda and a few other lesser known but very good products were included in the tests.

I like, and use SpySweeper. But none of these products alone get the job done. Microsoft's product is good, but SpySweeper found stuff on my system that it didn't and vice versa.

You need a combo of products to deal with spyware/adware if you use IE. You can do better using a free combo of Adaware and Hijack This for example, than you can using one pay product like SpySweeper or Microsoft's product or even both of those pay products together.

Carl

Steve Felix

I had an invasive bit of adware that Ad-aware and Spybot S&D didn't find, but Microsoft AntiSpyware did. Of course, Microsoft AS is pretty invasive itself, but it's worth it to have those ads gone.

"We're trying to make a movie here, not a film!"
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Rob Gillespie

Yeah, first after not using Internet Explorer.

No longer here.

Scott L

I tried searching for the report but it looks like you have to subscribe to see it online (bugmenot is no help :b).

Is Nod32 anywhere on that list? I keep hearing great things about it (the most secure, uses the least amount of resources, etc..). Although Comcast offers McAfee for free, I want to use something else.

Arthur S

Scott

They did not test Nod32. I don't know about the resources issue, or most secure.

The best I can say is that if Hotmail is using Trend Micro (PC-cillin), it must be awfully good.