I was using AVG, the free one on my laptop and the Enterprise version at the office. It was quite good for a few years, caught nearly everything and didn't bug me too much. However, since the end of last year it's been hogging the PC so much that I had to uninstall it from my laptop ... other programs simply couldn't get enough RAM. The laptop's rather old - has only 1GB RAM and XP32bit ... AVG was using between 100 & 300MB of that - not during a scan. And each time a program opened AVG was using 50% of the dual core, the program loading about 1% ... for several minutes. So I installed ClamWin, not sure how "good" it is ... but at least it doesn't hog the system so much.

Now the office is also starting to complain. Even with the much newer & "better" hardware & OS's we have there it kills performance drastically. We did a test, opening our major software (AutoCAD) took 6:32 with AVG running. With it uninstalled it took 0:23. All tested from a fresh cold-boot to ensure no DLL caching would muck up the times.

Anyhow, the final nail in the coffin was when AVG's renewal for the Enterprise license came up: R29,000 for the year on 60 PC's. Now we're dropping that particular viral program. Switching to ClamWin combined with M$ Security Essentials.

Anyone had experience about these, or know of something equal / better?