A lot of people have the same resource complaint with Avast. Glad to see you did a comparison with AVG and posted the results. Resource usage is sort of a double edge sword. On one edge we want low resource usage for the best possible protection on the other edge. Protection being the key word here. I think the heavy resource usage is just on start up where Avast is concerned. Neverthless, the so-called extra resources is the opportunity cost for peace-of-mind knowing you have adequate attack protection from the bad guys. When fighting the bad guys you want to protect yourself with extreme prejudice. I think Avast more than offers that for the user through the program itself, the staff, and peer support, just to mention a few.