Antivirus software
A Bulgarian IT friend says McAfee is the first software that virus writers use to test their viruses. Viruses are one national export there. A French IT friend confirms.
I have Avast Free. It works well. Have never needed the paid upgrades. AVG from Lavasoft has a good reputation and so does Kaspersky. Avast seems to use fewer system resources.
Windows Defender has been a good firewall. ZoneAlarm Free worked well when I used it.
I run SpyBot to inoculate once a month.
So far so good.
If most of my translation clients did not use Microsoft Office, I would have switched to Linux and OpenOffice ages ago. Now I'm on Vista (a pompous resource hog makes me feel Al Qaida is hacking my system every time I try to connect to my ISP or run Avast but performance is not that bad) and seemed sentenced to Windows7 when my ThinkPad X61 reincarnates into something else next year.