I currently have a Dell with McAfee antivirus pre-installed (3 month trial).
I actually like the McAfee program, but I find their products way overpriced.
I am considering going with Avast (Home) antivirus - which looks great from the reviews - the only critiscism being that it uses a lot of CPU resources and
slows down your system.
Does anyone know or have experience as to how Avast’s demand on resources compares with Mcafee?
Because I hardly notice Mcafee’s presence.
If Avast’s demand on resources is equal or less than McAfee, then the choice of Avast for me is a no-brainer.
Avast has a very very low resource demand, exspecialy compared to McAfee and Nortan, i have a 450 MHZ CPU and 256 ram and avast set to high and i don’t notice a thing.
Before this i used a 200 MHZ CPU and 128 RAM and i still didn’t notice a difference when avast was turned to high.
So i would say that you are fine with the resource usage from avast!
EDIT: Sorry nearly forgot to Welcome you.
Welcome to the Avast forums merf
–Lee
merf
Just a word of advice. Before you install Avast!, make sure that you completly remove McAfee. It’s not advisable to have two resident AV programs on your system.
Well, I used McAfee in the past and cannot compare ‘actual’ versions of both of them.
In the past, the use of memory and resources were:
Norton > McAfee > avast
Anyway, avast is so configurable that you can let it the way you want/need 
merf,
settings for standard shield set to high, on XP Pro with all providers running except Outlook (I don’t use it) less than 25 meg of memory and 1% cpu. Firefox (my browser is using more)
Welcome to the forums, merf ! 
I’m curious to where you heard/read that avast … uses a lot of CPU resources and slows down your system? ???
As you can tell from the above posts, neither is true! 
If you search “Avast” on google groups, use of resources is really the only critiicism people make of the product.
Norton Anti-Virus appears to use the most resources of all anti-virus products - and this is also the consistent criticism I found with Norton.
McAfee appears to fall somewhere in the middle, but as I said, I really don’t notice its presence.
So if Avast is like Mcafee (or better), and I suspect it may well be based on the above responses, then Avast is for me.