Before all, French is my native language so forgive me if part of the following sounds too mush "second language"
Now I would recommend you to say good bye to all the big name such as Symantec, Microsoft, Trend and company, for the following reasons:
1/ Their notoriety and market share make them the prime target of all the classes of hackers from white to black hat to "my name is john, I am 16, I can't code but I can still torn your life apart? (with ready made tools available on-line).
2/ Home user security products are low ticket products, lets say $25 average while security engineers and programmers are the highly paid. Large software companies will make all effort to lower the requirement in technical support related to security by developing products that fit all. Bigger is the name, larger is the market share, more generic the product is and you or your friend are not generic, are you?
3/ The corporate world is crumbling, the software industry is falling apart with it and a private software vendor can do now by himself what would have taken a full team of workers a year or two ago. Software is also becoming service, but that is another story....
Meanwhile, the best specialist for security programming are programmers from Eastern Europe. Do not ask me why but it is a fact. Microsoft itself entered the security market by acquiring a startup from Russia if I remember well, a couple years ago.
So to answer your question you will find the best security software for your friend in products from foreign startups and you should give special attention to companies from eastern Europe.
To me the best Anti-Virus for Vista is ESET Smart Security from the makers of NOD32, which was recognized as one of if not the best anti-virus on XP. I have been running ESET beta for Vista for several months and did not get even the shadow of a problem. As far as resource consumption and performance is concern, NOD32 is just mind blowing. Just look carefully at the following, its says it all
Note: I consider NOD32 as good or most of the time better in scanning and detecting than any other products above it in the following list. However, based on my assessment I also found the products below NOD32 on the list to be clearly not as good as NOD32 or even the products before it as far as detecting and fixing is concerned. This is the reason why I personally ended up selecting ESET which is the continuity of NOD32 for Vista, currently in beta.
Percent slower
Boot - CPU - Disk
Norton Internet Security 2006
46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8
7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007
45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006
2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS
16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002
11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare
11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper
6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5
7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home
4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender
5% 8% 54%
Panda Antivirus 2007
20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free
15% 0% 19%
Source:
