OT: Anti-virus / firewall solutions

[Fyron]

Symantec provides a Norton removal tool.

The built-in XP "firewall" is completely worthless, since it doesn't stop outbound connections (inbound connections should already be blocked at the router level). Vista's is good though, as it is actually a real firewall.

Ars Technica recently posted a security app guide. Check it out.

[AgentZero]

I use Comodo as a firewall, and haven't bothered with anti-virus in some time. I've used Norton, Mcafee, AVG & Kapersky at various points, and as far as I can remember they've detected two "viruses" though both turned out to be false positives. So now I just don't bother. I run online tests now & then and always come up clean. I stopped bothering with anti-spyware/adware recently as well, after I realized that all the "spyware" that S&D and AdAware were coming up with was all just cookies from the likes of Doubleclick.

And if Doubleclick wants to know what I'm Googling that badly, I don't really care enough to stop them. I'm sure they'll appreciate the irony of seeing "Ad blocking extensions" in there somewhere.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I use Avast and avg for virus-scanning and Spybot for spybots.