[sportsaholic]

If you had a choice of either ESET smart security or Bitdefender total security 2008, which would you pick?

thx

[kniht]

Best thing to do is download a trial version of each and see which one agrees more with your system.

Both are good products, however, I don't much care for 'all-in-one' security programs (suites). Kind of like the old saying 'Jack of all trades but master of none'. I have ESET Nod32 v2.7 antivirus on my system which works very well, but in my opinion the firewall of the ESET suite isn't as good as the firewall I now have. When ESET quits supporting NOD32 v2.7 as a stand-alone antivirus, I'm afraid I'll have to find another antivirus.

The above is just my opinion which can be taken with a grain of salt!

[redoak]

I agree, suites can not offer the best of everything. I have seen this opinion posted by TSG "experts," too.

{redoak}

[sportsaholic]

TSG "experts". Care to expound on this, please?

thx

PS...more opinions are welcomed.

[sportsaholic]

Originally Posted by kniht

Best thing to do is download a trial version of each and see which one agrees more with your system.

Both are good products, however, I don't much care for 'all-in-one' security programs (suites). Kind of like the old saying 'Jack of all trades but master of none'. I have ESET Nod32 v2.7 antivirus on my system which works very well, but in my opinion the firewall of the ESET suite isn't as good as the firewall I now have. When ESET quits supporting NOD32 v2.7 as a stand-alone antivirus, I'm afraid I'll have to find another antivirus.

The above is just my opinion which can be taken with a grain of salt!

You didn't say which firewall you have now and why it is better?

thx

[lunarlander]

Here's a site that does tests of firewalls. You can download each firewall's test results and also read the tests they perform on them.

http://www.matousec.com/projects/fir...ge/results.php

[lotuseclat79]

Hi sportsaholic,

ESet's NOD32 is an example of a heuristic pattern AV - i.e. it does not use signatures. If a zero-day virus occurs for which a signature is not yet known, any AV that is signature driven will not have a chance until the signature is known and incorporated into the AV. By contrast, a heuristic pattern matching AV has a better chance of excluding the zero-day virus unless it was constructed specifically with NOD32 in mind through a lot of experimentation - which only an expert would be capable of doing instead of the type of miscreant that just buys malware and makes a few adjustments to attack specific web sites.

I'd put my lot in with ESET for that reason.

-- Tom

P.S. I now use Linux exclusively - no AV, no AS, no AT, and no security tool costs. I use a Live CD. My disks are not mounted, so no exposure to malware. When I power down, if any malware did manage to get into my environment, because it only got as far as RAM, it gets deleted when the power goes off. My Firefox browser profile is saved on disk after I disconnect from the Internet. I have written customized scripts to update the Live CD environment with tarballs which takes only about a minute. I do use rkhunter and ckrootkit to hunt for trojans, and have ClamAV, but have found nothing since I started using my scheme - it takes a little patience, but it leaves me more secure than most systems out there.

[redoak]

Originally Posted by sportsaholic

TSG "experts". Care to expound on this, please?

thx

PS...more opinions are welcomed.

I browse TSG every day. There are regular posters who have thousands of posts and some are "moderators." These folks have obvious "expert" knowledge. It is some of them to whom I referred.

{redoak}

P.S. Suites are usually "bloated," too. Thus taking us more computer resources.

[ferrija1]

Simply put, I would prefer Eset's NOD32 over and BitDefender product, many of which I have found to be slow.

[kniht]

Originally Posted by sportsaholic

You didn't say which firewall you have now and why it is better?

thx

I have Comodo Firewall Pro installed on my system. Why? Check out the link lunarlander posted.

[jsparky77]

ESET Smart Security would take it. do a quick search on the internet for tests and you will see that kaspersky and nod32 will be the best