Which Anti-Virus Software?

[towen]

We currently run Symantec Endpoint Protection Suite here; we are looking at replacing it with a different product as our license is due for renewal and we are having numerous problems with it...

I would appreciate views on any anti-virus products... with a rating our of 10 if possible... (1 being high and 10 being low)

[FN-GM]

I found Sophos is pretty good. Easy to manage and deploy.

[contink]

I found Sophos is pretty good. Easy to manage and deploy.

I blow a raspberry in your direction but without belabouring the point I'm moving my schools away for numerous reasons revolving around it's inability to cope with packet loss on a WLAN and poor features.


Instead I've been working with Avast and the network management system... My review is around here somewhere so I'll not repeat it.. It's working well and resolved all my WLAN issues so I'm happy with it.

Not as user friendly or intuitive but worth the learning curve time spent.

[mattx]

I found Sophos is pretty good. Easy to manage and deploy.

Sorry, have to get this in but Sophos is complete and utter rubbish - in my opinion !!
There is also a reason why Sophos is cheap....... It's why lots of things are cheap - it's because they are crap.

[roty80]

We have just got rid of Sophos because we have found it to be rubbish too. Would not clean anything off after it found it and missed a lot.

Just replaced it with Trend Officescan and so far has been fantastic.

[k-strider]

We use Sophos... I don't like it though its bloated & resource hungry.
It is however very easy to deploy and manage. also our LA buys it in bulk so it costs us less than £200 a year for all our workstaions and servers!

So i cant justify spending several thousand on our 500 odd PCs for another AV

i personally like AVG though i haven't worked out how to easily deploy using the management console. <- a primary school i help at uses it.

[bizzel]

NOD32 has always been reliable for me. I've only used it on personal systems so I haven't seen the administrator console but if it's the same quality as the client it'll be solid. It's also very fast at scanning and the memory usage is below average.

The school I last worked at used McAfee Enterprise which was good. We had a few small problems with updates deploying but the performance hit on workstations was surprisingly low provided they had 512mb of RAM or more.

[tmcd35]

Only used Symantec Endpoint and Kaspersky. Can't say I could honestly recommend either. If AVG Network Addition is as good as the free home download version then I think that must be worth a look.

[DrPerceptron]

We're using McAfee 8.5i... I think we're also getting ours through the LEA (don't know cost though). We've got the EPO stuff to go with it and that's very handy to push it out, can do it at boot or force agent installs etc all the policies are centrally managed.

It's been what we've used for a while, has always just worked neatly in the corner - assuming you have the relevant HotFixes for it.

[localzuk]

Just got rid of sophos in favour of CA eTrust as our LA provides it for free to us, or we'd have had to buy a new license for sophos this year.

Sophos is very resource heavy, and can be very unhelpful when it tells you 'yes, you are infected, no, i didn't stop it or remove it for you'.

[teejay]

Have you updated to MR4 on Symantec Endpoint? We were also having a lot of problems, but MR4 is working sweet as now.
You have to manually unistall all the previous version endpoint clients which is a pain, but apart from that all is working well for us now.

[towen]

Hi Teejay;

Yeah we have upgraded to MR4 - Rolled out too clients also - Still having problems with it... (Issues relate to Roaming profiles!)

When you went to MR4 did you do a complete un-install of the product on all of your workstations? If so how did you achieve this?

[sparkeh]

Sophos here and I dont recommend it. Only reason it hasn't been binned is still got a long time on licence to run.

Agree with localzuk here, its finds stuff but doesn't remove it, then tells you you need to perform a full scan, which then tells you its found something but needs a full scan to remove so then you alter the scan options to tell it to remove things, but it doesn't so then you run a manual scan in safe mode and it might *just* might remove it. Probably won't and you reimage anyway.

These days I dont bother with trying to remove anything with Sophos, just reimage.

[AngryTechnician]

We moved away from Symantec after some horrendous profile corruption issues 2 years ago, and are now coming up to our first renewal on AVG Network Edition. If you'd asked me a few months back I'd have said AVG for sure, but there are currently three things that annoy me about it:

1. When 7.5 was superseded by 8.0, there was no automatic upgrade method.
2. The remote management/deployment console for v7.5 worked great, but I've never got the v8.0 console to deploy a client install (which made the manual upgrades very manual).
3. Just last week the AVG 8.0 SP2 update killed 70 machines on our site that we hadn't upgraded to XP SP3 yet (we had a good reason for it). AVG support have been very slow in responding to the issue and it has shaken my faith in the product quite seriously, even though it seems to have affected very few other people.

[teejay]

Hi Teejay;

Yeah we have upgraded to MR4 - Rolled out too clients also - Still having problems with it... (Issues relate to Roaming profiles!)

When you went to MR4 did you do a complete un-install of the product on all of your workstations? If so how did you achieve this?

Just uninstall in add/remove programs. You can get a removal tool if you phone Symantec, or re-image the workstations. I would also recommend installing just the Antivirus and Antispyware, the rest of the stuff does not work well out of the box and needs fiddling with and is probably the cause of your problems.