Your former coworker, Brian Livingston, and his associates put out the biweekly newsletter Windows Secrets, which includes a column called The Security Baseline that addresses anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-hacking applications and devices.

I do independent testing of antivirus, antispyware, and firewall/router equipment for computer security research and development. I can concur that the items on his Security Baseline list do provide an adequate to above average level of security. Additionally, I believe the items on this list are relatively easy to configure and manage and are a good bang for the buck, too.

OTOH, I have a nice little side income cleaning up people's home PCs.

I normally replace the user's AV with AntiVir for the following reasons:

1} It's free for personal use.

2} The virus defs are updated 2x a day. Compare this to McAfee which is updated ~2x a week with the occasional emergency update.

3} I can run AntiVir from my Ultimate Boot CD for Windows diagnostic disk.

4} I've received no complaints of AntiVir 'breaking' the Windows OS or other 3rd party programs.

5} It has a good record with me for catching all viruses.

6} It doesn't delete my copies of HijackThis! and other malware tools. Rather unlike McAfee which forced me to put my tools in an excluded directory.

5} AntiVir has a reasonably small footprint.

We use Trend Micro on Domino for our email AV scanner and McAfee Enterprise for our desktops. Not my choice.

Since the first of the year, I've recorded 8 instances where both Trend Micro and McAfee Ent. did not detect viruses attached to emails. Said viruses were picked up in later AV difinition files, but I don't consider the AV def updates to have been timely.

This is expecially true since I've started forwarding these emails to both my google mail and speakeasy accounts. In all such cases, my fowarded emails were bounced back to my work email address indicating either the email was valid or it was infected.

It makes me wonder what google mail and speakeasy are using to filter out viruses so successfully.

Because Antivir XP was not available as a choice, I voted for Eset's NOD32. My reason's are:

1} Fastest and smallest footprint.

2} Virus defs updated continuously.

3} Almost never a false positive.

4} Extremely effective at finding and quaritining viruses.

5} No discernable negative impact on the hosting OS nor other 3rd party programs.

Trend Micro was ok until I tried to renew. It took me quite awhile to get my account straightened out, and their support folks never did answer my email.

I have used the both the paid and the free versions of AVG. The paid version is quite reasonably priced. I bought two licenses. I do find the control center a little confusing, but after examining the configuration in detail I found the default was just right for me. I like that it is just antivirus and not part of a suite.

We particularly like that Sophos licensing allows employees of business customers to use the product at home, free of charge.  Since our IT policy requires employees to run a software firewall and AV product on their home machines, it's nice that we can give them the same products we use at work (ZoneAlarm for firewall, Sophos for AV).

Although we may have to give up on the Zone Alarm part.  We've been wanting to renew our subscription & upgrade, but ever since Check Point bought them they won't bother returning phone calls.  It's kind of weird, we've left phone messages a