Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Symantec Anti Virus versus Intego Virus Barrier

I use my Mac in a corporate environment and so don't have a choice of whether or not to run an AV client. With thousands of computers on our network, the security folks don't want to take even the slightest risk, and I don't blame them.

Symantec Anti-Virus (SAV) Corporate edition is our standard, and I dutifully ran it on my MacBook for the last two years. I came to hate the way it would trigger AutoProtect and start consuming CPU resources for apparently no reason. That in turn would heat up the CPU and start the fan going, which on the last generation MacBook sounded like a jet plane APU. This was especially true when I did a SuperDuper backup. I'd come back to the computer and the fan would be going at full speed until I either disconnected the backup drive or shut off AutoProtect.

I just upgraded to the new 15" MacBook Pro and decided it was time to try another AV client. After doing my research, I decided to switch to Intego. The difference is night and day.

This is a totally non-obtrusive product that just lives in the background. In my research, I read comments that state that there's really nothing to find on a Mac and that the Mac doesn't suffer from viruses or trojans like Windows. That may in fact be true. If, however, you're required to run an AV client, or you just plain don't want to take chances, my initial reaction to VirusBarrier X5 is that it's a better designed product. What I'd really like to see is an empirical study as to which product identified viruses most effectively. What I read in most reviews of SAV and VirusBarrier was simply anecdotal evidence that they found viruses. If I'm going to run an AV client on a Mac, at the very least, I want to know which one is really the most effective at identifying and wiping out the few viruses that may exist on a Mac.

No comments: