Norton

[Harrison]

Oh, that is still true. It comes installed as 30 day trials on a lot of new laptops still and I'm sometimes asked by friends to remove it for them and install something free/better, and it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it all completely. It often installs things at system level that run as services when the system starts, so they can't be uninstalled because they are running, so they need manually disabling, which can cause Norton's to throw a fit because someone is tampering with its files. So into safe mode, disable nearly everything from loading, manual removal of everything... only way. Definitely not home user friendly in removing it.

[Demon Cleaner]

You have the Norton Removal Tool that pretty much does it's job.

[Buleste]

What on earth's happened to Comodo??? It's become bloatware!! You have to have Comodo Dragon and Geekbuddy if you want any of the products and I started the 30 day trial of the Internet Security (AV and Firewall) and it eats all my systems resources when it does a full scan!!!! Definitely not recommended for an older system like mine. 2 1/2 hours and it managed to scan 2% of my hard drive and it was impossible to do anything else whilst it was trying to scan.

I think I'll go with the double sock method and find another free AV to go with Avast.

[Harrison]

Did you download the right version?

http://www.comodo.com/home/internet-...t-security.php

I've installed this version only last week for someone and it didn't have Geekbuddy or Dragon with it. I think as you mentioned a 30 day trial, you downloaded the Pro paid for version. Just download the free one, and make sure you untick the options in one of the pages that installs advertisers extras like yahoo toolbar, and then it is perfectly fine. I have Comodo Internet Security running on older systems as old as an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of ram and it runs perfectly well on there with no CPU resource hogging.

When I've seen a system scan do that with any security software in the past, a lot of the time there has been a bad infection on the system and the scanner locks up trying to deal with it and can't get past it, using 100% CPU.

[Buleste]

I tried the free trial of Internet Security Complete 2012. Uninstalled. Tried the free AV and it still hogged resources and installed Geek buddy and Comodo Dragon and didn't even give me the option not too.

AFAIK I haven't got any infections (at least according to AVG, Avast and Avira in the past) and in the 2 1/2 hours it took Comodo to search 2% of my computer it didn't find anything either so there should have been no reason for it to hog all the CPU all the time but it did. After uninstalling it all yesterday I've switched my computer on today and it's installing itself again!!!!!

[Stephen Coates]

I wonder how safe my Linux system is from viruses .

I'm not running any anti-virus/anti-malware software on here.

[Harrison]

Whilst virus and malware are know to exist, you are quite right Steve. Due to how Linux works, with it's permissions systems and hierarchy it's quite hard to directly hack, so malware is too much hassle compared to Windows. Equally because everything normally needs to be compiled before installing due to the vast number of different distributions and builds, it again makes it very hard to develop a standard virus that would work for all versions.

The reason Windows is so prone is actually because it is so user friendly. Consider the Microsoft have made it possible for a lot of code as far back as Windows 3.1 to continue running even under Windows 7, which is quite impressive, and so really does offer the user a good environment to run their code, but also allows virus and malware writers the knowledge that the whole userbase can also run their malicious code.

Linus will never become a standard desktop OS for the home user purely because of this, and IMO Windows will continue to, attracting the same annoying security issues.

Now take Mac OS X. Why hasn't that attracted the same level as Windows? It is a fixed OS much like Windows. All copies of the same version are the same and will run the same code. And pretty much all versions of OS X are compatible to run the same code. Some does exist, but it is more the smaller userbase and how the OS is used that I think limited the interest, more than being able to.