I hope everyone is doing well. I have a quick question that I hope you can help me with. I have a small home office with 2-4 computers connected. I use Windows XP Pro and I'm currently using Norton Internet Security and Norton System works. I've used AVG, Trendmicro in the past (all failed and I ended up with Viruses they couldn't identify or protect from) so now I'm at the point where I not sure which is the best software provider for an anitvirus/internet security and back up utility. I have recently had a my backup hard drive with all my pictures fail after 1 year and now it's going to cost a fortune to get the data so backup and time are definitely a concern even if I need to buy additional/separate software for that.

So part of my concern is that my machines performance is not affected because of the resources used by the antivirus program. The prgrams that I use for work are Act, Microsoft office and outlook, mozilla and internet explorer mainly. I have heard that I should also get a ghost program that can just back up everything and I know that norton has this but I'm not sure which maybe the best solution. Plus norton's support really sucks when you need help. Aka it costs $100 for them to tell you what and where a virus is that they don't identify. BS!!! (As you can see I recently had a bad experience with them)

My question is which software do you recommend and why (for regular antivirus protection, using the internet and ideally a ghosting backup software? I've seen the Kapersky is great for finding files norton and others don't but I've read that the scans and logs are vague and the software is ok.

Please advise or help me choose a good provider for my home office. Any advise or experiences is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Jimmy

IMHO Norton is living off it's name from when they were good, these days I see way to many people have problems using it, if you are going to pay for an anti virus it does not get any better than NOD32 IMHO, should you want an alternate choice to compare then Kaspersky is a good alternate, but if affordable NOD32 is my top choice.
Backing up is a different ball game, there are so many free and paid for variants I wouldn't know where to start, I will leave those most able to pass on specific info there, but to get you started manual back up's are free, and if there is a fear of drive failure my best advice is to create a raid array in a server, you can get Samsung F1 1TB drives for an extremely low price now, great drives and masses of storage, now setting these up in raid should make your data safe, BUT, you need a special kind of raid (it also requires twice the number of drives to produce the mirror), unfortunately I don't know enough about the special raid's to suggest which is your best one, but it will be one that mirrors your data, by having a mirrored array means you get 2 identical copy's of the data, so should 1 drive fail (which will take the array with it), you still have the mirrored array, this gives you time to replace\rebuild the damaged array to ensure your as covered as can be, as I say hopefully those with more specific knowledge of this will guide further, but I hope this gets you started.