Back in December Staples had a deal where you could get McAfee Total Protection anti-virus suite for free after mail-in rebates. Susan and I each got a copy and Susan also wound up getting a copy for her mom. I told my mom about the deal and she bought a copy as well. Mom uninstalled hers within a couple of days because it was slowing her computer down so much. I hung on for a few months until I had trouble with iTunes being blocked. Then a few weeks ago I was at Susan’s and her computer was so slow you couldn’t even have a menu drop down in Internet Explorer. I uninstalled McAfee and it was off to the races again.
Since then I’ve been looking for a replacement. I was thinking Norton, but it gets reviews nearly as bad as McAfee on Amazon. When I was at Fry’s this weekend, they had a bunch of software titles that were free after rebate. I could pick from Norton Anti-Virus (not the whole suite), Trend Micro’s PC-Cillin, Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0, and ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite. After reading some reviews, I decided on Kaspersky. Their anti-virus software is top-rated by Consumer Reports and is at the heart of a number of other protection suites, including ZoneAlarm and F-Prot.
The box actually included a manual . . . and it was in English! And not in any other languages, even though Kaspersky is a Russian company. They probably have different packages for different countries. And why not? The US market has to be huge.
The install was pretty simple. Once I was done I had to download updates which were about 4 MB (vs. about 30 MB for McAfee). It then had to run through a whole system scan which took about 4 hours, but that’s kind of unavoidable. It picked up an old setup file that it said had Gator Gain, so I deleted that file. Unlike McAfee it doesn’t bug me all the time asking about permissions to use the internet, etc. However it does seem to be filtering my Mozilla mail (we’ll see how that goes since it has been getting some junk lately) which McAfee never picked up on.
One thing it does, which I can turn off, is it pops up and tells me anytime someone is trying to get through the firewall. It happens a few times an hour. It’s kind of satisfying to know those things are being blocked, so I’m keeping that.
So far, so good. I’ll do a reply if anything new happens.
We use Macintosh for virus protection. Has worked for decades.
I was checking my Sitemeter web stats and the page would come up blank. When I went to my web pages the Site Meter counter wasn’t showing up either. I went to Sitemeter’s home page and they had a blurb on there that their servers had been brought to their knees because they have a counter on a Lindsey Lohan website and it was getting massive traffic due to her going back into drug rehab. I guess Ms. Lohan didn’t realize all the trouble she would be causing, but this is why people must say no to drugs.
Anyway, I thought that must be the problem, but after a couple of days I was suspicious. It turns out that Kaspersky has a banner blocker and sitemeter.com was listed as a banner advertising server, so all of its content was being blocked by Kaspersky. I unchecked Sitemeter in that list and I was back in business. I didn’t even realize I was blocking banners.
Had some problems while buying some stuff from the iTunes store. While it is pretty easy to turn Kapersky off temporarily, I found a solution on their support website.
In Kapersky I went to Settings:Protection:Trusted Zones and then added iTunes.exe and iTunesHelper.exe to the list. In the Rule Description I changed “all” traffic to “encrypted” traffic.
It appears this software requires an annual fee, which suggests it will stop working after one year. I have not renewed Norton Anti-Virus since they went to an annual fee.
They do. I am hoping I can get it for free again next year though. With McAfee that was always easy to find a good sale (though they would rather you renew online, for which there is no rebate), but with Kaspersky, it may not be possible.
I got the rebate this week, so it took a while, but they paid in full. I’m still happy with the product. It does this one thing where it warns me about Helkern attacks about once a day (an easily defeated virus), but I don’t want to turn off notifications in case something more significant comes along.
Fry’s is offering Kaspersky for free after rebate again this weekend. They don’t run that deal very often.