Also MyWOT staff, do you use F-Secure?
I use a PPC Mac 10.4.11 with Norton AntiVirus 11.0.1. There are few choices for Mac antiviruses, and only two known free choices.
Those are basically the only choices, besides common sense. It's still really good to have a Mac anti-virus, cosidering all the new threats. To see a list of about 90 threats, you can go to http://www.iantivirus.com/threats. To see a Mac Security Blog, go to http://www.blog.intego.com.
I also use Avast. And F-secures online scanner for a second opinion.
It's just a matter of 1) What you're comfortable with, and 2) What "plays well" with the other stuff on your system. Nevertheless, all of them may exhibit some problems. Antivirus programs are notoriously cranky.
The most common bash on McAfee and Norton are that they are resource hogs.
AVG, Avast, and Avira's Antivir are three that have gained a reputation for not taking up much resources, and they all have good detection capabilities.
As far as virus detection itself, they are all pretty good . . . retail or free, and the ratings that the trade magazines give them are all within a few percentage points, so I don't think any one is a whole lot better than the other (of course, there are a few slackers out there, but if you stay with the brand names and exercise good security best practices, you'll be pretty safe).
Ultimately, the only protection against phishing, forged Web pages, downloading malware, and other threats is the technology located between the user's ears.
And if you visit Manufacturer forums, just keep in mind that most people come to those forums to complain about problems they've had, so your information from them is going to be skewed. Very few people visit a forum just to say "Atta' boy".
And what ever you decide to pick, it's a good idea to run an on line scan now and then, because what your local protection misses (and they all miss some things), an on line scan may detect.
7. VirScan - http://www.virscan.org/ NOTE: This is just for selected files, NOT the whole machine.
8. Virustotal - http://www.virustotal.com/ NOTE: This is just for selected files, NOT the whole machine.
Re: What antivirus do you have?
We use all the major brands (not in the same computer, obviously =), mostly to test for any incompatibilities.
I had McAfee Enterprise 8.0i and Zone Alarm for many years, and I had no problem with them. But recently my system started to slow down significantly. I did a lot of troubleshooting and one of the things I did was switch to Avira's Antivir and Comodo FW. Don't know if that was all of the problem, but I am satisfied with them, and obviously my start up time has improved and also my resource availability is better.
I don't like AntiVir because it messes up my Vista, Firefox and it slows down my computer... It seems like out of AVG, avast and AntiVir, avast is the fastest for me.
I use Avast on my main machine and Comodo on my others, which I chop and change for testing.
AVG I gave up with when V8 was released, and although it is one of the most popular it lost a lot of ground with the new format, and is slowly starting to catch up again, but I prefer Avast's performance and cover.