McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008's protection keeps up with the changing threats on the Internet, but the product doesn't excel, burdened by a user experience that's basically unchanged from last year.
By rewriting much of the code, Symantec made Norton AntiVirus 2007 faster and lighter than its 2006 version, but a few glitches here and there keep us from granting it our Editors' Choice award.
McAfee Total Protection 2007 does what it says on the label -- it protects your PC from all sorts of nasty attacks, albeit at a fairly high cost to your system performance, especially on older PCs.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus earns our Editors' Choice as the best standalone antivirus application we reviewed this year. But, as the performance charts below show, the competition is knocking at the door.