Hi Hilmar,

After 20 years without using one, I decided to install Avast and am happy with it. It's lightweight enough to run on some older hardware, and it's free.

You can make things considerably easier on yourself if you point your dns settings to opendns.org (also free), and if you want to really laugh in the face of malware web sites, get SandboxIE (free with delayed instantiation or $30).

SandboxIE might get in the way with certain things and takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a really cool program. It runs your browser or whatever program you start with it inside a virtual sandbox, so those programs just THINK they have access to your drives.

You might also want to image your hard drive (ghost, acronys, etc.) and keep that img handy for when "lightning" strikes.

Alex


>Can someone remind me what the options are for free antivirus programs, for home use - and perhaps a suggestion, which is best?
>
>I have been using AVG for some years now, but the version I am currently using makes my computer very slow, and I can't even update to the latest version, recently announced - I get an error message every time I try.
>
>Using Windows XP.