software clash

[cellio]

The Norton personal firewall that came pre-installed on my new machine is interfering with the McAfee anti-virus package I immediately installed. These days, that's just plain bad manners. I guess it's time to shut the Norton firewall down and consider replacing it with McAfee's. (I wasn't previously running with a personal firewall, relying on the router to do that for me. I'm not sure I need it.) The firewall is probably a trial copy anyway; the machine also came with Norton anti-virus, but only for 60 days.

(I prefer McAfee anti-virus to Norton; it does a better job of telling me what it's doing and it doesn't demand to restart my machine after practically every update the way Norton did when I was using it. I have no opinion on the firewalls, other than a sneaking suspicion that it'll work best if from the same vendor.)

Apropos of nothing, I just made an appointment with my vet for "Erik plus one". She wants to see Erik in a few weeks and they're all due for checkups, but I they could only fit in two cats on the target night. So we'll see who I manage to catch that night. :-)

Comments

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

Any reason you're not considering the ZoneAlarm product for your firewall. From what I've seen, it does a better job. Also, consider getting a hardware router, even if you only have one computer, to provide additional protection and NAT translation.

[cellio]

I have a hardware router with built-in firewall. So to some extent this is belt and suspenders.

I hadn't considered ZoneAlarm mostly because I hadn't considered any (additional) firwalls before finding one on my new machine. Thanks for the pointer.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

I also endorse the ZoneAlarm personal firewall which I use in addition to a harware router/NAT.

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

< ot type= "advocacy">I realize this is off-topic, and that you're not asking for advice....
But when people mention virus-protection for Windows I feel compelled to mention two products, both of which are free:
sekhmets_song uses AVG (http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php) on her Windows system, and I use ClamWin (http://www.clamwin.com/) on mine. The former is a snap to use, and even works with Thunderbird. The latter is still beta (the current release is 0.37), and is free and open. It requires more user input, but that doesn't bother me.
< /ot>

[cellio]

Oh, I don't mind advice; I didn't know there was other quality stuff out there. Thanks for the pointers.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

FYI, I too use ZoneAlarm - even paid for Pro. Worth it.

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

I really like the AVG. I just updated to their newest offering and have found it unobtrusive and very thorough. And Free. Free is good.

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

Free and open is even better. Here's hoping that ClamWin is someday as easy to use as AVG.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

The others have some excellent points, but I wanted to delve into Norton, since that's my demon of choice.

Norton and McAfee don't play well together, but that's because they both have the same general functionality, and step on each other's toes. After looking under the hood for both products, I think this is more McAfee's problem.

If Norton asks for a reboot evey time you update, then there's something wrong. It's not supposed to do that (much). Besides, you can always defer the reboot until your next shutdown cycle.

My dad uses McAfee Security Center, or some such crap, and I was not impressed in the least. I had a major bitch of a time correcting an access problem when he mistakenly hit "No" when he meant "Yes." It manifested itself in denying access to individual web pages, which I thought might have been a cookie or ACL issue. In Norton correcting this is a breeze. With McAfee, I had to uninstall, manually scrape through the .ini files and the registry, re-install and re-teach.

No thanks. Despite what others think might be strengths, this product rates a 0 out of 10 on the ease of re-configurability/corrective action scale, and therefore removes itself from "Cary's Big List of Recommended Software."

The only other major product of note on the list is Windows ME. Any client that calls on me to fix a problem with Windows ME gets forcibly upgraded to 2000 or XP. No exceptions, no excuses, no choices.

My biggest real issue with Norton is that the program it uses to delegate tasks (ccapp.exe) can sometimes gobble up CPU.