Symantec stopping updates for older versions

[Asha'man X]

Hey everyone

I was just on the Symantec website now now to download new virus definitions for our school's Symantec Corporate AV version 9.

I see at the top of that page that they will be discontinuing updates for version 9 at the end of July
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-SAVCE.html

That is not good at all for our school, as we never budgeted for an AV upgrade. Even more so, we got the whole version 9 box pack a few years ago free when it was given to a lot of schools in the Western Cape for free. We are also a private school, so I'm not sure if any educational discount would apply.

I'm going to have to now look around for something similar in scope to use, and try to find some sort of pricing. With about 85 computers and a few more coming, I need a centralised system of updating definitions and managing policies, which is why I really like the Corporate Edition. Not to mention that we have a lot of really old and creaky Pentium 3's with 10 gig hard drives and 128mb RAM. The CE runs pretty well on these ancients, but I think new anti-virus packages may be too much for them to handle.

Does anybody have any suggestions or recomendations? I'd really appreciate some tips on this one. I'm open to using AVG or some other product, but it must have central policy management and virus definition distribution, and be able to run on those creaky P3's I mentioned.

Thanks everybody

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Look at AVG Free - I think the licence exempt non-commercial organizations, you can always ask AVG if they're willing to help with lower pricing and stuff.

If you look at central management, AVG also have a more advanced package if AVG Free won't work for you.

 

[killadoob]

do ppl actually use it anymore?

 

[The_Unbeliever]

We've kicked out Symantec - definition download was getting too big, and software was just getting slower and slower.

 

[Asha'man X]

@ The_Librarian

Thanks for the tips, I will look at AVG with the cental management facility. We used to use AVG Free when our network was smaller, but the previous administrator eventually got swamped with keeping everything up to date, not to mention the amount of bandwith it was eating with updates.

I also agree that the definition download is getting to big. 30 odd megs now, compared to about 10 a year ago. The scanning and system speed is fine, it actually works a lot better than the commercial Norton packages (spit on that program ) This was with CE9, before it got more and more bloated.

 

[daveza]

Probably best if they stopped all updates for all versions, and then just stopped.

I spend a good part of my day removing Norton from new laptops that clients have bought.

AVG - what a pleasure.