Anyone have any recommendations today on a good antivirus program that does not leave a big imprint on your system?

I've used Norton but it really grinds my harddrives. When you run it, you really need to plan to be away from your machine for awhile.

That might have been acceptable a few years ago but I think today, these kinds of programs to be less of hog with resources.

I personally have no problems with norton and have found it to be the best out there of the ones i've tried... My school has a site liscense of the corporate version, so all it has is antivirus, nothing else. I think the days of norton utilities are over, so if you find yourself with all their other ditritus you should uninstall it. I run it on my mobile 900mhz cellery and don't feel that it's slow. The nightly scan, on the other hand, slows it down, but if I'm ever up at 6 in the morning, I just kill it and let it run the next night. If you don't leave your computer on all the time, just leave your computer on one night a week and let it run then when you know you won't need it. Sorry to give you the ansewer you specifically didn't ask for. Macafee is probably your only other choice. It's a lot of work keeping a antivirus program up to date, and speed of response to new viruses is the most important factor.

Matthew

Because of the number of files on modern machines, especially PCs running any semi-recent version of Windows, a full scan is going to take a while no matter what you do. Especially if you have any number of software titles installed. It's speed will always be limited to the speed of your hard drive(s). But, IMO, McAfee VirusScan is the way to go. I use it on my machine at home (PIII, Win2K, 7200rpm drive, 512MB RAM), and I have no complaints about use of resources.

My favorite is Sophos. Not nearly as intrusive as the others.

If you don't care about real-time virus protection, this site works great:

Online Virus Scan

I (and the company I work for) use Grisoft's AVG Antivirus Free Edition. We've found it pretty good so far. It's discovered a few viruses that have arrived at work via email. Only thing is, it doesn't seem to get them when they arrive (like Norton does), it discovers them later, after they've delivered their payload I guess. However it has prevented infection and has successfully removed them. The good thing is that it's free (beer). They bring out virus updates about once a week.

We used to use McAfee Total Virus Defense but it Blue screened some of our PCs and with each new virus update more PCs would be affected so we dumped it. I've talked to other people who've dumped it for the same reason.

Hope this has helped.

depends on what you want.
If its a standalone box then mcaffee or sophos. But if it is at work and need a central console to distribute definitions and manage the AV program over lots of machines, then you have no choice reallty, it has to Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition.