My system (and drive) are rather antique … the physical drive is 40G of which 35 is the main (C:) partition and the rest is an “invisible” partition used by Restore-IT for its quasi-imaging function. Typically I’ve got about 70 percent free space, give or take 2 or 3 points, so 40G is fat for my current usage.
Anyway, back to topic – on my drive, avast takes up 181 MB in Program Files and another 12 MB in Docs & Settings. (Probably also some drivers go into the system folders, but I didn’t check there.) So even if I totally removed avast (and didn’t replace it with something else), I wouldn’t gain as much as 1 percent free space even on my small drive.
I played around with some old 8080 8 bit systems I don’t even remember how I acquired (probably from trash at the side of the road)but the first computer I actually bought and used was the original TRS-80 with it’s 4k of RAM and the cassette deck for loading and saving software. I programmed some things on it in BASIC but I really got into things when I got a Coleco ADAM system that was color and had 64k RAM. I still have that system and programmed many things on it like utilities and games. Coleco never released any way to duplicate it’s software so people had to figure that out for themselves. I programmed in BASIC, as well as some assembly and even a few machine language routines. ADAM was way ahead of it’s time with a PnP system for it’s peripherals. It was as proprietary as Apple though. The first internet capable machine I got in 1999 from a custom builder called NuTrend. It was pretty cutting edge at the time with a Pentium III 450mhz CPU, an ATI Rage Fury video card, 64 mb of RAM and a 8.4gb Hard drive. I started out with McAfee AV and switched to Norton after about a year. I was on dialup from 1999 to 2004 and never ran any kind of a firewall. The internet was a much safer place in those days.