AVG's installation is quick and easy, adopting a no-nonsense approach without making things unnecessarily complicated. Virus protection seems more than adequate, although there are likely to be others that score "better". For the time being am still open to suggestions.
It's obviously fairly basic in its free incarnation. I am, however, not convinced that the AVG suite that you have to pay for actually detects more viruses because as far as I know it works with the same definitions database.
I have been using Kaspersky for a couple of years or more, and originally bought it when I was living in Holland. This was the Internet suite v. 6, and it seemed to work well enough.
Two weeks ago, I decided to buy the new version, 7, and immediately ran into serious trouble.
Firstly, I absolutely detested the overly "bureaucratic" installation and activation procedures.
What I hated even more was the clumsy and aggravating "help" procedure that led to ZERO help, to all intents and purposes.
In installing the package, I was given a key that promptly failed to work. Even before I was half-way through the process of trying to install this abomination, it kept telling me that I was trying to install the software on more than one computer. I had not installed anything on any computer, but somehow couldn't get rid of this warning.
Eventually, I suddenly seemed to get a "new" key - both the new one and the old one that had been sent to me via email appeared in a list of keys supposedly installed. Or whatever. I gave up making sense of the thing and just went with the flow!I installed the other key, in other words not the one that I had been given originally.
So, eventually I managed to get Kaspersky 7 going, spending the next two weeks becoming utterly disenchanted with it.
I have no doubt that this Kaspersky does a great job doing what it says it does. EXCEPT THAT TAKES ITS OWN SWEET TIME DOING IT! It was absolutely infuriating the way it seems to massage, tweak, feel up and fondle every file, website or email message that comes its way, slowing everything down in the process. My computer is about two years old but by no means a slouch (Pentium D, 3.4 Ghz, 2GB RAM etc, with XP Professional (I refuse to have anything to do with Vista).
But Kaspersky slowed it down to a trickle. Opening (for instance) GMail in Firefox could take five minutes or more, and if I made the mistake of opening something else as well, there was all hell to pay. Things would freeze up, everything would come to a complete standstill and only the reset button would get things underway again.
I suspected Kaspersky as the culprit from the start but could not be sure until I had tossed it off the computer again to see how things would go after that.
As a stop-gap measure, I installed AVG (free) and ZoneAlarm, and with Kaspersky gone I now have a machine that's flying again!
Which brings me to the point I was going to make: long live AVG. I did see it as a temporary measure, giving me time to look for something suitable to replace Kaspersky. I now think that I may have found it already. AVG in combination with the free ZoneAlarm firewall seem to be doing a fine job without any of the hassles I was having with Kaspersky. I find the latter too finicky and too intrusive compared to AVG and (for instance) VET that I used for many years in the past.
I have three PCs and a laptop - all of which were running Kaspersky 6. Today, all of them have AVG and ZoneAlarm on them. There is no way that I could be tempted to try and put Kaspersky on all of them, the prospect of having to go through the same hassles and frustrations every time again - no thanks. Not to mention the fact that they want you to pay for extra licences.