First off, I have an HP Pavilion with Vista (32 bit Home Premium) on it now and am going to go to Windows 7 (Professional, possibly 64 bit). I'm going to reformat and put on 7 instead of Vista. Just thought I'd say that first to give context. I want to know what you all think is the best antivirus suite right now? I'm not looking at free AV software, I want the good stuff that I have to pay for. Full excellent protection. The other thing I want to know is if any of you use or know about the online back up system Carbonite? I have it on my laptop, but I think I have or at least had a virus on it. I don't know if Carbonite backed up my virus, I hope not! Since I had my virus, sometimes when I start up I get an error message that the Carbonite can't access the registry and it won't work, so I reboot and hope I don't get that error. I hope it is actually backing up properly when I don't see the error! I am also having trouble getting my laptop to find my external drive on the network (via Ethernet cable) or with my USB A-B cable. It is annoying. My computer won't let me enable "file sharing" or "public file sharing". I am hoping to manually back up some of my most important files, since I'm not fully trusting Carbonite. "format c:" and "format d:" are in my near future.
What makes you think that free antivirus software isn't as good as the paid versions? There are several excellent free alternatives available (I use avast) but I'm hearing good things about Microsoft security essentials. If you exercise a little bit of caution in the websites you visit and the e-mail attachments you open, I see no reason why you need to actually pay for antivirus software.
