I haven't heard the exact date in early 2021 when the current legacy Norton v22.15.5.40 products will officially reach end-of-support but when that happens Win XP and Vista users will stop receiving virus definition and other protection updates and their Norton product will stop working correctly. For more information, read End-of-Support announcement for Norton protection on Windows XP and Windows Vista.' After the end-of-support date, computers running unsupported operating systems will no longer receive product, service and protection updates, and virus definitions.

An exact end-of-support date will be communicated soon and your Norton protection will continue to function normally until then. 'Norton protection will stop supporting Windows XP and Vista in early 2021. If you read the warning at the top of that support article Norton Maintenance Mode for Windows XP and Windows Vista it notes that all support for these legacy products (including virus definition updates) will end in 'early 2021'. Norton v22.15.x products (the legacy version for Win XP and Vista) entered 'maintenance mode' in June 2018, although there have been a few necessary product updates since then to fix problems with expired certificates and URL changes for the Norton backend servers. If you have a current install of compatible Norton on the Vista machine it will go into ' maintenance mode' and will still be better protected than running 'freeware' that will leave you open to more nonsense I noted in that thread that I'm not a fan of Avast's business practices but as far as I know it's one of the few free or paid antivirus products that still runs on Win XP and Vista. See my comments in JohnJames599's Oct 2020 thread Best Antivirus about the legacy version of Avast v18.8. I purchased a lifetime (perpetual) license for Malwarebytes Premium many years ago, but Malwarebytes stopped selling these lifetime licenses in March 2014 so you would have to pay for an annual subscription. Just note that the real-time Ransomware Protection feature in MB Premium can't be enabled on these older operating systems. See the Malwarebytes FAQ Malwarebytes Support for Legacy Windows XP and Vista Operating Systemsfor more information.

My Vista SP2 test machine is rarely connected to the internet these days but I use Malwarebytes Premium v3.5.1 (the legacy version for Win XP and Vista, available at ) for my real-time protection on that machine and it still receives regular malware definition updates.

Vista virus protection free