Ignore the hype: Go with free, and go with what actually works!
Ad-Aware 2008 free edition finds more things than any of AVG's stuff, or Spybot S&D, ever has. I tried AVG's anti-virus and it found NOTHING! Spybot was cumbersome and also did not find as much, if anything. The only thing I use by AVG is their "vCleaner", which I download to my C drive, and then run in safe mode to scan for, and clean, any bootup viruses. Other than that, I can't understand all the fervor over AVG or Spybot S&D - neither perform as well, and McAfee's real-time protection (Firewall set to "Stealth" mode, Anti-virus, SiteAdvisor, and Spamkiller) has warned me of scam emails, websites and downloads, and caught and cleans tracking cookies, etc., and stops and kills serious threats (hijackers, trojans, etc.) before they've even had a chance to load on my PC! More times than I can remember anymore, McAfee has saved my PC. For running a manual scan, McAfee's anti-virus needs to be more sensitive, since my Ad-Aware 2008 free can find more than McAfee's ani-virus when running a scan of my entire computer. I stay away from anything by Symantec (Norton) or Trendmicro (full of tech glitches). Other than the McAfee SiteAdvisor loaded on my browser to keep me from downloading anything that would compromise my PC, I find that viruses, malware, & spyware don't have a chance because I run Ccleaner (another freeware) and Diskeeper after every online session, and before shutting my PC down each time. Both Ccleaner and Diskeeper 2009 only take several seconds to run. Ccleaner runs 35 passes of blank data over whatever it finds, and Diskeeper beats the hell out of any defragmenter Microsoft has ever included with its operating systems, especially Vista, including the ability to perform bootup (restart) chkdsk's and defrag's that include all the system files and folders, and automatically defragging in the background whenever you have your PC on, invisibly as far as use of system resources is concerned. Sweeping my PC, including the registry, with Ccleaner, and keeping it defragged with Diskeeper, keep it running lean, mean, and FAST!
Of course, I have only those startup exe's active that absolutely have to be to make bootup faster, and I only install those applications I know I'll use, and nothing more. So, my mere 160GB hard drive is 70% empty (that's including the O.S.), and I have a USB-connected backup hard drive by Iomega to which I do fresh backups weekly (that was a great investment). I only backup what I need, but enough so I can reconstruct my PC if I have to competely wipe my C drive, reinstall Windows XP SP2 from scratch from my CD-ROM (I won't touch the XP SP3 update, or Vista), and then reinstall my drivers and applications from there.
