Kaspersky Internet Suite

I am not connected in any way with Kaspersky so have no boat to paddle.

I have been using Kaspersky ever since I saw a tv interview with Kasperksy himself about how he was so frustrated about bugs in pc's. So he decided to do something about it. He actually took on russian hackers to make a virtually foolproof system for keeping pcs clean and running smoothly. I started with 2009 and am now up to 2013.

KIS is only on my pc, on my Win 7 laptop I use MSE.

To my mind KIS has succeeded where others are not so clever. I refuse to use norton because it is such a big drain on pc resources, its not a small machine software at all. McAfee never did anything for me.

Firewalls are covered by KIS and, if you want a good freebie - Zonealarm is still the best freebie firewall protector by far.

I use KIS hand in hand with Advanced System Care, they work well together. ASC keeps my pc clutter free, and monitors it. There is a very good free version but I enjoyed it so much I paid for a full version.

I have just put KIS on both my computers in the last couple of days which I got free with banking with Barclays bank and was disappointed at first because my computers came to a standstill but after doing a full scan things got back to normal. If I didn't get KIS free I doubt I would have bought it. I would have kept Avira free.

I'm glad you're happy with KIS, I used it from version 2009 through to 2012 but found that my boot times were too long with KIS, I tried a few others, namely VIPRE, AVG Pro, Trend, Sophos and McAfee and in the end I decided to settle with McAfee All Access Total Protection, which I feel is not the best in terms how it impacts the overall performance of my PC but my PC starts up faster with McAfee then it did with KIS and McAfee make it easier for my to cover my entire household with a single package, which I think it better as I have quite a few PCs and laptops in my household.

I don't trust the free packages, that doesn't mean to say that they don't do a good job, but there used to be a time when free packages were usually one shot options and once they had found and removed a threat and further protection from that package needed to be paid for, that might not be the case now, but I do remember reading about things working this way in the past.

As for Norton, people often talk about Norton being slow and bloated, but in all fairness Symantec completely re-wrote the package from the ground up around 2010/11 which vastly streamlined the package and it is now the best package that they have ever released, whether you're looking at NIS or 360, they are all much better and nowhere near the drain on resource that Norton used to be. Not that I would start using it because of this, I still don't like them as a company as I feel their dominance in the market is a direct result of anti-competitive behaviour and has nothing to do with the quality of their products.

My boot times are no affected by KIS, but as its a quad core 3gb ram I suppose it can be handled. When I had it on my daughters old laptop, yes, it was ridiculously slow. KIS is also relatively inexpensive compared to the other majors. $39 gives me 12 month licence and it was only slightly more for a 3 machine package. Apart from a nasty ad bug which infiltrated last week, prob due to some download by either me or my daughter, its been totally bug free since 2009. The bug(ger) that hit me was tidy network, which throws up adds all over the screen and in web sites with linked words, I managed to kill it when found.

Best free firewall is zonealarm by far. Best free AV is I think AVG. But, as mac says above that first all important scan is time consuming and a bit heavy but well worth it, if only for peace of mind. Something like that should have been run overnight.

I am not sure if there is such a thing as a best firewall and best AV. When tests are carried out by various magazines etc the results could be completely different a couple of days after after new updates which didn't prevent the latest virus. I found AVG hogged the CPU and sometimes found I couldn't even boot up and zone alarm I found gave a good visual that it was actually working whereas most firewalls just sit in the background unnoticed.
So far I am very pleased with KIS but I was also very pleased with Avira free. I think the main thing is have an up to date AV and a firewall and keep away from dodgy sites.