Charter Security Suite - Opinions? Any Good?

[C_T]

We recently switched to Charter Cable for Internet, and as a high speed customer we are entitled to use for free their Charter Security Suite (aka Charter High-Speed Security Suite), powered by F-Secure.

Is anyone here using this and how has it worked out for you? Easy enough to set up and use? Does it provide solid protection against both virus and firewall issues? It apparently also has the usual security suite "features" like parental control, pop-up blocker, etc., and the concern with that is we mostly wouldn't use this stuff and would want to turn features like this off, so it would help to know if we have the option to customize the program features to our liking.

Up until now we have always used Norton Internet Security Suite, and while it did have tech related problems come up from time to time in the past, it has always kept us virus free and secure. It also mostly works in the background, updates itself, lets the user decide what features to use and which to turn off, etc. The downside is it costs about $70 a year.

Would appreciate hearing from any Charter users or anyone else with an opinion to share. Thanks.

[LoudNoise]

The folks I know who use F-Secure all like it and it does keep them clean. The reviews I checked out seem to rate it fairly high.

[psaulm119]

I've been using it on my desktop for 2-3 years now. Within an hour or so after first installing it, it found the remnants of a trojan that Antivir had left undetected for a couple of months. It never found anything after that--most likely b/c there was no other malware.

We use both the firewall and the av/as. One thing I'm not happy with is the new flash-like interface, which sometimes takes several seconds to load, and also, to leave the screen after I've x-ed it out (although that is on XP with 768 megs of RAM). Occasionally we get error mesages about failed updates, when it had already been updated within the last couple of hours. I'm rather uncomfortable with any type of error in an av's updating mechanism, which was why I uninstalled AVG 8 from my laptop (well, that and the fact that their help forums were a waste of time)--but it does update, regardless. This last one (erroneous error messages) might be the only thing that is really their fault.

As you can see, nothing much to complain about in a free antimalware suite from a pro vendor. For a free suite its really not that bad. On my laptop I could have installed it also, but I chose first AVG and now Avast, so I guess I like it but not enough to think it is the best out there.

[C_T]

Thanks for the opinions. We most likely will give it a try. The worst case scenario would have been to install it, find it wasn't very good at all, and then we would be stuck with it until we could replace it. But it's sounding more and more, from your posts, that it's worth trying out, and perhaps we will then keep it. We've relied on Norton for many years now and it's done the job, but the savings is too significant to not take advantage of Charter's offer.