A Good Performance, Part 4: Security

I used to believe that the most expensive security software is the best which is simply not true. I bought a couple of years Norton’s Personal Firewall, later McAffee’s firewall and currently I am having my issues with Norton Ghost (but I won’t get into that, no worries). While there is very good and very versatile software out there I’ll take a closer look on the downsides of the software for the poorest: The inexperienced user.

Those big brands (McAffee and Norton) are big brands also because they code big software that takes a big chunk of your memory at any time, has a simple yet unnecessarily intricate user interface with big shiny buttons and require big updates every couple of days and sell big numbers of their big packaged software for a big price.
Again it is software for the dumbest of all every-day users who need to be protected from themselves. So there is a lot that is happening under the hood where you have to guess what dumbed-down menu-item might stand for a complex concept. An exaggerated example would be a checkbox saying “Estimate very good?” that actually means to searching your hard drive with a very high heuristic. Some options might be hidden at all from the unknowing novice-user that an experienced user may look for (e.g. port blocking or allowing pings from a certain IP).

As a free bonus to a terribly performing system you get annoying messages such as “Application [insert random name here] wants to access the internet. Allow this?” every time with some applications, while others you blocked by accident are hard to unblock thanks to the above mentioned confusing interface structure and file-lists with hundreds of entries where only five of them are shown at the same time in a cramped window with a fat frame in the manufacturer’s signature color.

Alternatives

My point is: If you aren’t your company’s security engineer you probably want to stick to to ambitious freeware. I use AntiVir for years now and it does a decent job. The pay-version is not much different but also offers e-mail protection for your POP3 accounts and so on. I only access my mail over my browser so I wouldn’t benefit much from it.

I didn’t use it within the past six years but I’ve heard nothing bad about ZoneAlarm of which there was also free version, provided it still exists. So you might want to try that one yourself.

Personally I use Windows Defender and the Windows Firewall (not so much by choice but by laziness to install anything different) and haven’t had an outbreak or hacker attack in years now, so I assume I am either well protected or just damn lucky. Last but not least I update my operating system weekly with the latest patches and fixes and stay the fudge away from Internet Explorer!

If you have very sensible data on your machine and are very paranoid you want to cut the connection to the web on the machine in question completely and use a different PC for surfing and other web-related stuff. In that severe case of paranoia I also suggest that you don’t connect those two computers neither physically nor through a WLAN. If you have data to transfer use a flash drive and scan the files before copying for possible threats. You can’t get any safer that that.

I used to believe that the most expensive security software is the best which is simply not true. I bought a couple of years Norton's Personal Firewall, later McAffee's firewall and currently I am having my issues with Norton Ghost (but I won't get into that, no worries). While there is very good and ...

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