yep, and in my experience both are bloated resource hogs that may very well do the job for some but, personally I'll stick with something that is as good or better and does it's job without bringing my system to a crawl.

 

This is just business, Microsoft excels at this behavior... Get as many people as you can
to use your product (increase market penetration & share) which gives them the future
revenue streams from people who subscribe to the updates (in Microsoft's case, get
people to pay to upgrade when the old versions are incompatible with the newer ones -
planned obsolescence).

 

My three year old Dell Inspiron 530 desktop (WinXP Home SP 3) came with a 90 day Norton (bought new). I replaced it with AVAST FREE when the Norton was close to running out. I knew the Norton was a resource hog but since it came already installed.....used it. Put up with the slow bootup times until changed.

I used to use AVG Free/7.5 in my other computers before until it changed. AVAST FREE has never given me any problems and the updates are incremental compared to AVG. A few times, I went to formally "secure sites" where AVAST stopped exploits/trojans from being downloaded through popups or on site (dang hackers). I didn't click on any of these either, as I know better. After the stoppage, I backed out or closed the page normally. Then scanned immediately.....AVAST did its work well.

I use FireFox as my browser but still keep my IE updated, though. Recently upgraded to SP 3 so I could continue receiving the security updates.

I also use Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware. "ZoneAlarm Free" is my firewall. Now, IT may cause your computer to boot up a bit slowly but until I find something better.....

A friend uses BitDefender (paid version) and swears by it.

Basically, a bit of common sense goes a very, very long ways.