Antivirus for Mac and Windows

Hello people,

Before anyone tells me to use the search function. I did. Except the results it brought up kept giving me 404 errors, and not being well versed in tech lingo, I have no idea what they are.

All I'm asking is people's opinion on what the perceived best antivirus program there is out there that works on both operating systems.

I've heard of avast! and Norton but I'm not sure which would be better for me.

Thanks in advance for your time.

EDIT: o bloody hell, now I see the thread just a fair bit below mine. ignore me.

 

For Windows machines, I use Avast exclusively. It's fairly lightweight in terms of system resources required, does a good job, and stays out of the way unless it's needed.

For Mac? Can't help you there, since I don't have access to one (I am planning on buying a MacBook next month, though).

 

Here's the windows thread to answer your question

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=190538

For free I would look into AVG, Avast & Avira. Out of those three I prefer Avira. Just personal preferences since I tried all three.

For paid, there are BitDefender, Kaspersky, NOD32 & others. I use Kaspersky due to personal preferences and prefer it over all the ones I have tried out.

 

Hey, thanks a bunch for replying, even though I clearly didn't browse through the forums enough. I'll probably buy an antivirus program, I've been using free ones for years and Kapersky seems spectacular enough

 

Nod 32 is also nice, I am using that and it is pretty light and not a resource hog like some of the other anti virus programs that I have used.

 

Yeah, my recommendations for Windows antivirus are NOD32 and Kaspersky!

 

another recommendation for Nod32 for Windows. For OSX, you really don't need an anti-virus.

 

Symantec endpoint 11 FTW!

 

Avira is pretty good, but the notifications pop-ups, and automatic updates can be pretty annoying if you don't turn them off.

 

I've been hearing that ALOT, and believe me. I'd much rather not have anti-virus for Mac OS X, but being the absolute tech idiot/moron/dunce(whatever name you wish) that I am, I have more questions :S

Is there any chance a virus contracted on my Win XP partition(it's a 40GB partition out of my 120GB total space), can somehow spread or leak into my Mac OS X partition?

And I know there is little threat from malware, spyware or viruses and all that on OS X but yet no one ever says there's NO threat.

And thank you again everyone for replying, much appreciated that you've bothered and not given me the link to the search option.

 

A computer virus is just a computer program. A program compiled to run on Windows cannot run on any other OS making a virus targeted at Windows machines (99.99% of them) "worthless." As far as malware, yes you are pretty much safe using OSX. Although you can still fall for things like web based phishing schemes (which does not rely on a program being installed on your computer) so don't be totally careless while using OSX.

 

The only exception I know of is office macros that you can transfer to PC's and get them infected but there are currently no viruses or trojans in the wild for OS X.