By John Dodge
PC Pitstop has published the results of a pretty interesting PC security survey and found the two least effective anti-virus programs are the ones many of us use – McAfee and Symantec Norton. I use McAfee and as far as I know, there’s nothing sinister on my PCs.
That’s not to say McAfee and Symantec Norton don’t have their strengths: Symantec was tops in Spyware protection and McAfee was second. The most prevalent threat is spyware. But the pair didn’t distinguish themselves like Kaspersky, which ranked first in protection against viruses and rogue security software.
In other words, no one program does it all. Here’s Pitstop’s conclusion:
“No one security provider is good at protecting against all aspects of security. As the analysis suggests, each vendor has some strengths and some weaknesses.”
A whopping 23 percent of the 50,258 PCs that Pitstop analyzed had no security protection at all and 14 percent had some sort of ”high level security threat.”
I’ve always found it annoying that I have to pay close attention to viruses and spyware that are so prevalent in the Microsoft Windows world when Macintosh users get off scot free. But the delta between Macs and PCs remains so great that I’ve stuck with the later (I am typing this post on a very good HP Pavilion dv4 that I bought for $290).
