You know what, this sounds like a lot of other things in life when you ask peoples opinion and this is not meant to be disrespectfull of anyone. Everybody gives their own opnion of likes and dislikes, if you read this thread every AV Prog mentioned is pants and in fairness I hate AV progs because generally speaking they take resources from your PC and slow it down to varying extents but we do need them in reality. Free AV progs are slimmed down so don't offer full protection. This said event all singing all dancing progs don't offer full protection either as they don't control the weak link. We as users are the weak link as we can be easily mislead and think before we click. In my experience most bits of malware are self inflicted due to users actions. We do things like open attachments, install software (some freebies), we browse the internet look for images download things and we get messages on the screens that we just click OK and often it's the ok button that can actually be any part of a popup window that gives the malware permission to install. For every person that is clever enough to write code to stop malware there is someone equally clever to write code to get around it and the cycle goes on and on.
My opinion is YES FREE AV's such as AVG, Avast and Microsoft's version are fine as long as you are carefull and think about what you or others are doing on the computer. I always give people this advice about the internet "why would a complete stranger want to give you something for nowt!!!" think about that when you are down loading things or playing free games on the net.
Jim
PS waiting to be shot down in flames!!!
