Antivirus/firewall Software Reccomendations

I know this issue has come up lately but i cannot get the search feature to work
well anyways, ive decided to ditch the pre installed Norton security suite and go for a more leaner, less resource hogging antivirus/firewall. ive heard and checked out a few sites that said Kaspersky and Bitdefender were excellent antivius software and that zone alarm pro was a good firewall. what do u people think of the software or any others you reccomend? whats the good, whats the bad features in your opinion? theres so many different companies out there its confusing to know which ones to go with , unless you know of actual user opinions

thnx for any input

i really dont mind paying for antivirus/firewall protection...as long as they are effective and they dont hog a lot of memory

how much resources does bit defender use?

well u could count how many background processes are associated with bitdefender and how much memory each process uses. i know that norton security suite has around 5 or 6 processes constantly running and consumes 50MB

well i just thought id say how well zone alarm pro(firewall), bitdefender standard(antiv) and kapsersky(antv) ran on my system.

zonealarm pro is a great robust firewall . plenty of tweaks and options. no stability issues or strange behaviour although there were loads of prompts about programs trying to access the internet but this can be fixed in the control panel. only has 2 processes. one suprise i got was when i used the cache cleaner....i recovered almost 500MB in disk space

bitdefender 9 standard was also a great robust antivirus . definelty leaner on the resources compared to norton antiv...i experienced a 33% reduction in boot time using bitdefender 9. there are 5 processes attached to the antiv which seems like a lot but doesnt have a bigger performance hit compared to norton.

kaspersky antiv 5 was a nightmare . once i installed it and tried to connect to aol via dsl, at a certain point during the process, the system crashed.....and it always crashed at the same point which was a mystery to me . i decided to uninstall kaspersky and when i rebooted and the OS was loading, the display was all garbled. it turned out that the unistall corrupted the nvidia display drivers . so it wasnt a good experience for me .