Antivirus conundrum
Nov. 26th, 2008 06:07 pmThe Behemoth laptop is nagging me about the impending expiration of its Norton Internet Security subscription. My ISP, meanwhile, is nagging me about its 'free' McAfee-based security package, and of the four working machines around here, Behemoth is the only real candidate for that. (Diamond the desktop has a three-year McAfee subscription with two years to go, Butterfly the Dell laptop is taken care of by work, and Beetle the Eee runs linux. Harriman the oldest laptop no longer has antivirus, but it's a Win98 machine that's rarely turned on at all and is not allowed on the internet any more.)
So, renew or replace? This the oldest of the in-use machines around here, a heavy-duty (and physically heavy) Sony Vaio with a stupidly small system partition and a mere 512Mb of RAM, coming up on five years old but perfectly adequate for its current uses, which are mainly websurfing and writing. On the one hand, there's something to be said for not spending $50 or so on its next subscription; on the other hand, I'm not sure how well it would take to having a completely new security suite dumped on it, and I'm slightly uncomfortable about tying my protection to an ISP that's tied to my current location.
(And no, I'm not really comfortable with trusting the machine entirely to semi-crippled free alternatives like Avast or AVG, either. I'm pretty careful, and have never had a problem on this machine yet, but I do occasionally mistype a URL or click in a bad place, or stick my memory stick in a communal computer of dubious hygiene.)
So, renew or replace? This the oldest of the in-use machines around here, a heavy-duty (and physically heavy) Sony Vaio with a stupidly small system partition and a mere 512Mb of RAM, coming up on five years old but perfectly adequate for its current uses, which are mainly websurfing and writing. On the one hand, there's something to be said for not spending $50 or so on its next subscription; on the other hand, I'm not sure how well it would take to having a completely new security suite dumped on it, and I'm slightly uncomfortable about tying my protection to an ISP that's tied to my current location.
(And no, I'm not really comfortable with trusting the machine entirely to semi-crippled free alternatives like Avast or AVG, either. I'm pretty careful, and have never had a problem on this machine yet, but I do occasionally mistype a URL or click in a bad place, or stick my memory stick in a communal computer of dubious hygiene.)
