Antivirus Norton 360

Espoo

Hi All

I bought a new laptop last week in pcworld. I got Norton 360 also. The laptop came with Mcafee. There seems to be one month free with it and I get a daily count down. But then I get a message to activate the Mcafee. I assume I just need to go into Add/Remove and take out the Mcafee and then install Norton? I just want to go about it the right way so the two of them don't conflict with each other and mess things up.


Cheers.

ED E

Remove McAfee, throw Norton in the bin.

Espoo

Ok thanks Ed. Its that bad? What would you recommend instead?

ED E

User education.


3rd party AV has to shoehorn itself into the OS to function at all. Defender scores as good as the best of them and doesnt cause strange behaviors and performance hits. Turn on defender, dont do stupid things.

If the user is a luddite take away admin privs.

Espoo

Thanks Ed. I don't know much about these things. Defender obviously comes with windows. I was looking at it just now. It seems to be turned on as it says "no action needed" for each of the settings in the "windows defender security center". So do I just need to remove mcafee? I was going to go back to pc world with the Norton 360 but of course it came free with the laptop. Explains why its crap? Pity the 100gb of cloud storage would have came in handy. Appreciate your help.

JoyPad

The problem with these so-called free cloud storage is the time limit. By the time the free subscription expires, you might come to use the cloud storage, and then you will probably decide to pay a subscription, because it's too hard to move your data out of the no-longer-free storage.

If you need cloud storage, look at the truly free options first, like Google Drive or Dropbox Basic.

Espoo

Thanks Joy
Yeah I have been using Dropbox. It's grand. I have it on 3 machines at the moment so I cant put it on the new laptop without spending money. I wonder if I took it off the older laptop would I then be able to install on the newer one ? I don't need much space. The basic version is fine if I get away with it.

Niallfitz1

can anybody give me advice on whats the best anti virus software to get on a laptop

FanadMan

Niallfitz1 wrote: »

can anybody give me advice on whats the best anti virus software to get on a laptop

If you are Windows 8 or higher, read above. Defender and a bit of common sense is perfect.

PropJoe10

Nuke all third-party antivirus software and use Windows Defender as many folks have said. It's more than adequate for a home user. And just be careful with your browsing habits!

coylemj

FanadMan wrote: »

If you are Windows 8 or higher, read above. Defender and a bit of common sense is perfect.

Applies to Windows 7 as well. I'm on a 9 year old laptop, have never had anything but the standard Windows protection and I run the free version of Malwarebytes every week or so. Never had a problem with a virus or malware.

Back in the 1980s and 90s, the media were suckers for the latest scare story about viruses with all sorts of fancy names. Thankfully they eventually saw that the hype served no good purpose other than to promote the sale of AV s/w and they've given up that nonsense.

Skerries

Windows Defender with Malwarebytes which runs a free scan once a month

job done!