Antivirus: ESET Nod32 v4 or Kaspersky 2009?

[Shinova]

After a recent stint with some annoying viruses and my free antivir giving me problems, I decided I should go for a professional solution instead and have narrowed my choice down to Nod32 or Kaspersky. Now I've just been trialing the latest nod32 for 20 days and am about to start trialing Kaspersky, so yes I am giving them a personal run but I wanted to also know what the experts here thought about the pros and cons and versus of these two programs.

[Count Chocula]

I have and use Kaspersky, and recommend it. One box purchase gives you a license for three machines (oddly, I have three PCs), there's been no performance hit on Vista32, Vista64 or Win2000 that I've seen, and I've been virus-free for a year. My wife's noted that the AV has spotted and stopped viruses from infected online shopping site she goes to, too!

My vote's for Kaspersky.

[White Haven]

Kaspersky's alright when it's working, but it's another 'breaks if you look at it wrong' antivirus, and that can be a huge headache given the some viruses like to look at it very, very wrong. Obviously I don't see many computers in perfect working order in my job as a small-shop technician, but what I've seen of Kaspersky hasn't impressed me. It falls in the 'better than Norton and Mcafee, but so is a root canal' category as far as I'm concerned. ESet I've heard very good things about from some of my colleagues, so although I haven't used it personally yet, I'd recommend over Kaspersky on those grounds.

[Stark]

NOD32 in complex or commercial situations (ie, not just a few desktops) has either a lot of extra features or a lot of clutter and poor UI (depending on your opinion). It's never failed to protect me from anything, but then I don't encounter nearly the level of virus danger many seem to discuss here.

[Edi]

After a recent stint with some annoying viruses and my free antivir giving me problems, I decided I should go for a professional solution instead and have narrowed my choice down to Nod32 or Kaspersky. Now I've just been trialing the latest nod32 for 20 days and am about to start trialing Kaspersky, so yes I am giving them a personal run but I wanted to also know what the experts here thought about the pros and cons and versus of these two programs.

If you're a glutton for punishment wrt UI and needing to read a thick manual cover to cover, try Comodo Internet Security.

Completely free, full features of a commercial suite and this is meant as an industrial strength security solution for companies. You need to read the manual to understand this thing and then you need patience setting it up so that it has a set of policies that don't annoy the crap out of you at every turn (so that it learns your programs). Once that's done, you can just save the configuration to an external file, so that if you need to set it up on another computer or reformat this one, next time you just import the existing configuration from the file.

I tried to use this with the "Real Men Don't Read Manuals" approach and that was a dismal failure. The only things that have prevented me from switching over to Comodo are lack of time to tinker with it and the fact that I'm not the sole user of the computer in the house.

[rapidsquirrel]

I'd vote for Nod32. It's fast, efficient and makes my life easy at work. People barely even notice when it's running a scan. Kaspersky was more of a resource hog, but all things being relative, they both far exceed anything Norton or Mcafee have to offer. I'd offer you pro's and con's but I don't think the issues I had with running Kaspersky in a Citrix environment will mean much to you, nor remote install issues for both in regards to medium scale deployments.

Though one major pro in favor of Nod32 is I did have it clean out a virtumonde infection auto-magically. That's fairly impressive in my book, having tried to clean that damn virus by hand before.

[CorSec]

I've been using Nod32 since a friend turned me onto it years ago. It has an incredibly small footprint. I only know it's still running because it tells me when it updates itself. I've only had one false alarm in the four years I've been using it and that was for an MMO executable that self patched; a quick google search cleared it up. It's flagged a number of attempts by websites to implant malicious code onto the hard drive. I can't compare it to Kaspersky as I have no experience with that program.

[Shinova]

Both programs so far in my experience have very small footprints, although Nod32 seems to have a smaller one and uses up much less computer power when running any on-demand scan.

Kaspersky scans my computer much faster than Nod32. I can't tell for sure which nabbed more viruses. I cleaned out my computer of all my problematic viruses with Nod32, and then found some more with Kaspersky afterwards, but I can't tell if it's cause I picked up new ones since my Nod32 full scan or it's because Nod32 missed those. Also I may have had Nod32's settings to default, while with Kaspersky I put everything to max.

Nod32 definetly has a much better UI and is much more hassle-free to operate, and to think Kaspersky is vaunted for being easy-to-use.