Basically I'm looking for something that will do the things Norton did that I liked, in the background, when the computer is idle (more or less), without hogging a lot of resources and without all the "extras" that Norton 360 had that I ended up never using. Anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spyware, anti-spam, decent firewall (altho I suppose I could just use the Windows Firewall), basic maintenance to enhance performance and clean out unneeded files, that stuff. And I don't mind paying for a program that will do all that without a lot of hassle.
I put my old copy of Norton AV on my computer at work when I bought Norton 360 for the home machine - that was several years ago. Up until this spring I just paid for the subscription myself... I know we're supposed to have AV protection at the server level (?) for our network, but I don't know what it is or who maintains it (it ain't my boss, I can tell you that) and so I've never trusted it completely. So for as long as we've had PCs I've always kept my own AV program on my computer at my own expense and in the past when everybody else's PC ended up infected with some trojan or malware because of something stupid one person did, my computer was the only one in the office that stayed clean.
Anyway I got tired of paying the subscription fee so when it came due I uninstalled Norton and got the free AVG anti-virus and I noticed the difference in performance immediately - particularly in how quickly I get from turning the thing on to having Windows up and ready to go.
I'm just wondering if all of AVG's software is that easy on the system, even if you install their full internet security suite and the PC tuneup stuff. From the looks of it the two combined would do everything I want and if I can have that without adding a significant drain on resources I would be very happy.
Anyway I've a free 30 day trial of the internet security stuff so once I install it I'll know very quickly whether or not it slows stuff down too much.