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.
Where do I start.....so much mis-information, so little time.
1) I would discount what a Bulgarian IT friend says. Unless you have a sample size of more than 30 Bulgarian IT friends your information is statistically (and probably racially!) flawed.
2) AVAST (and AVG) don't limit their functionality by number/types of viruses detected - to do so would be corporate suicide in their market.
3) Lavasoft doesn't make AVG. AVG makes AVG (used to be a Czech company called Grisoft, who have renamed themselves).
4) System resources used has as much to do with the modules within a package as the package themselves. For instance, whilst I recommend AVG (well I would, i'm an AVG licensed reseller), I wouldn't recommend you install their AVG Toolbar or AVG Active Surf Shield.
5) Windows Defender isn't a firewall.
6) Windows 7 is to Vista as chalk is to cheese
