RMK - why are Norton and Mcafee no good? Which would you recommend?
Either Kaspersky
www.kaspersky.co.uk or ESET
www.eset.com.
I concur with Paco’s anecdote on Norton, I’ve been similarly told by the corporate computer repair company I use that Norton and McAfee problems account for a large part of their repair business.
The most recognised or marketed name/brand is often not the best – this is particularly true for Norton/McAfee. They are what I deem “bloatware” i.e. software that is designed in a manner that they just throw a mass of code at the problem instead of seeking the best solution.
Not to get into Jingoism/Xenophobia/Stereotypes, but what I call bloatware is common in many American software packages. The background to these software coding styles is the example of the American kid writing software on the latest machine with newest/fastest chips and access to the highest bandwidth as his backdrop. Conversely, his (say) Ukrainian counterpart is using a machine/chip one chip model behind and has much slower bandwidth; so he learns to write his code as “lean” as possible. The end result, when you compile the code of both the American and Ukrainian software coder and put them on the best machines available, the latter’s software just screams in comparison.
For an aviation example, we’ve all seen documentaries on American fighter jets where they take such pride in the mere size of the software utilised. I was watching one this week where the guy was standing next to their new latest/greatest jet and saying "this aircraft has 90 million lines of code" – that really doesn’t matter when the pilot has to call the team with laptops just to get the damn thing started.