I used to have trendmicro I used it for free when I worked with a previous company, when I left I had to uninstall it and switched to using Zone Alarm.

I tell you on some days I really want to pull my hair out when my PC really works like a snail and sometimes really so unresponsive for up to 5minutes or more, I'm tired of using ZA and ready for another change even if I have to pay for it.

I have a Celeron 2.4GHZ with 768MB ram, not the newest but with trendmicro it was still very responsive. Before trend I used symantec that in my opnion is another big resource guzzling software too.

So what else is good Anti-virus with built-in Firewall that won't gobble up all my system resources.

For antivirus on Windows XP, I use Avast Free and for a firewall I use Comodo Pro.

hey thanks dangral but what's the performance like, is your PC responsive after using these 2 software? What are your machine specs?

Hey sparcguy, I use Avast Free as well. And I have a reasonably old laptop - 1.6GHz Pentium M (no "Core"), 512MB RAM, Windows XP Home Edition.

While it does work well most of the time, I find that it also does slow things down a bit.

seems like a number of folks use avast. zonealarm is free too, well sort of.

but avast sounds a lot like zonealarm i don't wanna get something that works like zone. I don't mind to pay but it must be worth the money.

thanx for the info bt.

I installed Avast on my XP laptop thanks to this thread and like it.

Zonealarm, I never really liked it (locked up, very slow etc.)

If folks list all the AV software they like (or think should be on our list), we can create a poll on this topic for everyone to vote on.

I use McAfee and it sometimes slows stuff down. But it periodically rescans every file on my system to catch newly discovered malware. Are these products that cause no performance issues simply not rescanning?