Your information is out of date, and if you are in IT, you will know that a week is a long time, so do some homework, and don't live in the past, by the way I'm not endorsing any product, just stating some facts!.......................
Oh come on dragon I know a lot of enterprises that shudder at the thought of Symantec near their networks, they are good at detecting viruses and attacks, but their system hungry software has an effect on nodes. Most of the work I do now are on network hardware, and most security are on firewalls that work with or are in switches and routers.
That is no longer correct, and if you do your homework, you will find that they have now one of the lightest foot prints, but don't take my word for it, just go and check, shouldn't be that difficult for you as all the PC mags have run their tests too and practically all of them are now recognising that symantec have resolved their heavy resource issues. Anyway I test quite a number including Bulldog, AVG, F-Secure, Kaspersky, and in my view, Symatec have the balance right. By the way commercial Network environment is hardly the defacto, for home user network protection, different animal all together, you should know that! By the way most home users have their Router hardware firewalls switched off by default, or don't know they are inbuilt at hardware level, and while the hardware firewall may well be the first line of defence, that defence is limited to the nature of the system itself, which has only a limited knowledge on traffic packets, where as a software firewall is able to take a closer look at malicious traffic and intercept it before it leaves your computer,it’s in a position to know a lot more about network traffic than simply what port its using and where it’s going, software security will also know what program is trying to access the Internet and whether it’s legit or malicious, it consults a regularly updated database to determine this, of course you'd know all this wouldn't you Valley............. Link: http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/marapr-2012/
AVG Antivirus, MalwareBytes and Spybot Search and Destroy all have exstensive free versions and are very good - and those three in particular work well together without intefering too much with your system. DO NOT DOWNLOAD MCAFEE. IT SUCKS.
