I first got on line back in 1999. I started out with v4 something of McAfee’s AV and was satisfied with it and the following v5. When v6 came out, I paid to download it and could never get it to work right. I was in constant email and live chat with their support trying to fix the problem and they kept assuring me they would find the problem and make it work. Then one day they said they could not find out what was going on and could offer me no more assistance so I then asked for a refund. They told me that the refund period for downloaded software was 30 days and I was past that so they couldn’t help me there either. This again , was after constant contact and them assuring me they would fix it. I immediately switched to Norton and once I did , wondered why I hadn’t used it from the beginning. It was so much better than McAfee. I stayed with Norton from 2001 to 2009, going from just the AV to the full Internet Security Suite in 2005 and upgrading every successive year. I was always pleased with Norton and never had a single problem, slowdown, or infection. In 2009, I decided to see what level of protection I could get for free and switched to Comodo Internet Security. After a year of dealing with the annoying HIPS popups for safe and necessary actions, and then the horrible sandbox they introduced, I grew disenchanted with their approach and switched to the free Avast! in May of 2010. I’m not sorry I did. Avast! is the best in my opinion.

On the Vista machine here we first tried MSE and it worked fairly good but had times when it didn’t update for days at a time. They told us it really didn’t matter unless you were out of date by more than a week. What a joke. What made us give up on MSE and put Avast! on that machine as well was what happened both times MSE put out an update to the program itself. On both occasions, the upgrade aborted in the middle after partially uninstalling the old version leaving the machine with no protection whatsoever until I could manually complete the uninstallation of the old version and remove all the left over registry entries and other things. Then and only then was I able to download and install the updated version. Avast! has now been upgraded through the program gui 2 or 3 times on that same machine with no problems whatsoever.