said by simmery:I don't think it's pure FUD. I would say it's over-reaching. Naturally, he has a stake in selling Symantec products, and I will give him the benefit of the doubt regarding his sincere belief in the superiority of his product (or perhaps similar commercial products).
I think you can probably meet or exceed the level of protection a commercial suite offers by frankensteining your own free collection, but you have to be knowledgeable about each product's limitations, compatibility with other products, quality of its update procedures, and so on. Some people enjoy keeping up with all this; some don't.
Commercial suites are invasive and do measurably slow down you computer, but a lot of this can be attributed to weak/old hardware and OEM crudware/bad configurations. I have not been bothered by slowdown with any suite I've used on the computers I build and maintain myself.
Right now, I'm quite happy using NIS 2009 and have no interest in chasing around after free applications. I do not put my faith in NIS 2009. I merely hope it will protect me if I make a mistake. Meanwhile, I try to be careful about what I click on and keep recent disk images on an external hard drive.
Paying for McAfee and Norton is completely not necessary. The only people who get suckered into buying them are those who bought computer that came with a free trial and the pop up saying your expired scared them to pay $100 for another year.
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