I seriously use Linux on my trading (and non-trading) PC's (RHEL6). It's amazingly stable, never runs stupid updates without my own wish, can simply forget about viruses/malware and most of trading software I use is Java based so makes absolutely no difference if it's run on Windows, Apple or Linux. As for the few Windows apps I need, there's always VirtualBox software run "within" the Linux box and protected by being connected to the network through NAT. Hardware resources required for virtualization are not an issue nowadays with all those quad-core processors and dirt cheap RAM.
+1 For an occasional web search/email run it in a sandboxed browser i.e. http://www.sandboxie.com/index.php?GettingStarted For a general purpose system which requires AV program, there are many good options, and this thread like so many others tend to create conflict between peoples personal choices... Kaspersky, Avast, AVG, MS essentials, malwarebytes, Nod3 I have used them all satisfactorily. Norton and McAfee are bloated and intrusive, but hey if that's what floats your boat... why argue.... Bottom line if you don't want your 16-yr old daughter to get pregnant... only protection you have is abstinence. Don't surf on your trading system, don't visit porn sites "accidently" don't click on links --- Think Nunnery +1 Simple and effective
I heard from some friends who had Webroot but were unhappy with it. One issue was that 3-4 times it found a virus/threat when they did a weekly system scan, but it didnt catch the virus when it initially went on to the computer. So who knows how long it had been there. So when the subscription ran out they switched to Norton, and after installing it and running a scan it found 2 viruses right away that the Webroot had missed. So I would say Norton > Webroot.
Microsoft Security Essentials + Malwarebytes Anti-Malware + noscript using firefox if you still get a virus using the above, you deserve it.
I have used antivir and others but was using Comodo (firewall, defender and anti-virus). I got a little sick of the constant chatter and did some research starting from this thread. Now I'm using Windows 7's own firewall and have added Panda Cloud Antivirus (free version). The result is quiet and should have better av detection. I may go to the pro version for the additional behavioural testing but I thought I'd run the AV for a while first. Very low resource utilization and lets me exclude my trading software directories. http://press.pandasecurity.com/news...-free-antivirus-in-recent-av-test-evaluation/
I have been running ESET for 2 years on the 7 workstations that perform both trading and development functions for my company. ESET beats, by far, all of the regular candidates, Norton, MacAfee, Avast, Microsoft, that I have tried in past. ESET operates with a light footprint as regards resources, has great spam detection and has yet to miss a virus, a corrupt website or email and is less expensive that other commercial alternatives. cheers
About 2 years ago a group of colleagues and I started an online business. We have slowly expanded into other areas and everything was going well. Goog contacted us that one of our sites was distributing "Badware" as they call it. This site was an autoblogger and should never have had a problem. We took the site down and down loaded all the files (1 gigabyte). We checked it with MS Security Essentials, but it found no problems. It was rechecked with AVG and it found 6 problems, the same ones Goog reported in the webmaster tools. Cleaned the site and uploaded it. Wanting a better understanding, we loaded a small USB hard drive (500 gig) with all the data we could get, leaving about 25% free space. copied the Badware site to the drive along with some other trojans, etc that we gathered. MS SE found a few items, but missed quite a bit. AVG found more of the problems, but not all. Tried Norton, similar results to AVG. Tried Avast, found ALL of the badware, trojans everything...then on the reboot into DOS it found and cleaned all the remnants. We now take our sites down once every 30 days to test and clean. We believe that our site contracted the Badware from other sites on the same shared host. We are currently investigating our own server for a data center or SiteLock for all of our sites. To anyone thinking that $60 or even $100 per year is too much to pay, then I suggest you consider a new line of work or consider how much time the cleanup is going to cost you.