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Do You Use 3rd Party Virus Protection on Your iMac?

D

davekarn

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 27, 2007
358
33
If you do, then which brand do you use? I'm debating whether it is necessary to buy any such service for my iMac and if it is, I'm not too sure which one to buy. I value the opinion of the Apple community much more than anyone else. Thanks for the info in advance!

~Dave
 
There isn't much need for it in OS X. The biggest reason to use it at this point is to help keep yourself from passing along viruses to your Windows-using friends. But if you do want virus protection, don't go with the commercial ones like Norton...they do more harm than good, messing with your system and bogging things down. ClamXav is a good, lightweight, and free checker that is quite popular.
 
There are no viruses for OS X. AV programs for Mac only scan for known Windows viruses; And if an OS X virus should appear, you'll still get hit since all AV programs are reactive in the sense that they can only scan for known virus profiles.

You don't need it unless, say, you're running a server for Windows machines, receiving and forwarding data from/to them.

Otherwise, all AV software for Mac is going to do for you is lighten your wallet and overburden your machine as it consumes CPU cycles and memory. It may even very well corrupt your system by quarantining whatever data it judges to be a virus (this happens quite a lot on Windows, particularly with Norton)
 
About two years ago I switched a co-worker to Mac, and then she switched her mother. Soon after I started getting all these panicked calls from the mother saying her new iMac was doing some crazy things, which it should not have been doing. It just didn't make sense on a brand-new machine. Well it turns out she insisted that the chain store install a commercial anti-virus program because "all computers have viruses". I think she got a PPC version which was running thru Rosetta and doing all sorts of wonky stuff. I removed all signs of it and her new iMac went back to normal.
 
Cool, thanks for the info guys. I knew that there haven't been any virus attacks directed toward OS X, but I didn't know if that track record included things such as malware and spyware. Thanks for the info again.

~Dave
 
eRondeau said:
About two years ago I switched a co-worker to Mac, and then she switched her mother. Soon after I started getting all these panicked calls from the mother saying her new iMac was doing some crazy things, which it should not have been doing. It just didn't make sense on a brand-new machine. Well it turns out she insisted that the chain store install a commercial anti-virus program because "all computers have viruses". I think she got a PPC version which was running thru Rosetta and doing all sorts of wonky stuff. I removed all signs of it and her new iMac went back to normal.
Click to expand...

Haha, that made me laugh :)
 
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