Going to reformat and install Win8 on one PC's and Win7 on the other. Last post I can find on PC Antivirus is June 2011. A lot can change in that time. Good security is essential for everyone using the internet so should be in everyone's interests.

Tried a few over the years. A few years back I used AVG but found it slowed the system down. Changed to Avast but that was slowing my downloads by half because it insisted on scanning every file. Could disable the option but it kept re-enabling itself. Currently have Avira on one machine but it pops up with annoying messages saying it has disabled autorun for security, even though autorun isn't enabled with me anyway. Got Comodo internet security on the other machine which seems fine at the moment... but is it the best. One annoyance is that Comodo won't let me disable the antivirus when I want to.

Also running Spybot S&D on both machines which I have no complaints about, and also MalwareBytes which is ok but sometimes annoying in blocking websites that I know are not a risk.

I would assume that quite a few of us here use our PC's for many similar downloading tasks and visit similar web sites. So in your opinion what is the best antivirus which has a good balance between security and not having to put up with annoyances. What else are using alongside the antivirus software. Fine tuning can also make a big difference so what are the preferences you have changed to make it work as you want; because if it works for you it will probably work for a large percentage of other forum members.

Searching the web it seems that Avast is now highly rated by many review sites. As I said a lot can change in a couple of years so maybe I should give it another chance. Just thought I would ask here first to get an unbiased opinion. (">