For years I used security software on my machines. First I had Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security as a all-in-one security software but with the years they pressed more and more (useless) features in and it became slower and slower. Last week I tried to install Trend Internet Security 2007 on my old notebook Pentium 3 1.5 GHz 512MB Ram. That was a mistake! System slowed down and crashed. Now I switched back to avg.
On another Athlon64 machine I used Zone Alarm pro in combination with ESET Nod32 and Webroot Spysweeper. Webroot brought several upgrades and with each of them the system became slower and less stable. So I decided to kick out spysweeper and turn on the antispy in zonealarm. Not have been very lucky with that setup…
Now I bought a new core 2 duo machine with vista and thought about security software. I decided to do it without a personal firewall, antivirus, antispyware but decided to setup a virtual machine. With the new CPUs it’s a pleasure to work with such a setup as it doesn’t slow down your PC in any respect.
I will never install security software again (at least as long as manufacturers do build crappy functions in it). The Virtual machine setup really gives you peace of mind and do not fake security or slow your system.