Are Free Antivirus and Firewall Products Really Any Good?

There was a time in my life when I used security and protection suites like Norton and McAfee, but after a while I grew unsatisfied with them.

"But Norton and McAfee are giants in the industry that pack every last bit of there software with features users never dreamed of! What more could you want?", I hear you ask.

Well, that's kind of the point. Over the years, software suites like these just continued full speed down the road to bloatware. They kept accumulating features like a snowball rolling down hill. They've got features and functionality I never used, and don't really need quite frankly. Often times the system tuning and performance components just sat idle, using my system's increasingly valuable and every more rare RAM.

I did what most people do, I suppose. I bitched incessantly about paying for features I didn't use, didn't want, and worst of all had to actively work at removing from my system! Most times that wasn't even an option, since everything threaded together in a tight knot, with system failure at every turn so that you couldn't pick and choose the features you needed without having all the needless bloat to go along with it.

Then I realized that some other bright people were experiencing the same headaches and were in a position to do something about it. What they did was create their own programs to solve each discrete problem. In other words my friends, say farewell to bloatware!

So now I assemble a patch work of software products that do what I need. They do one thing, and do it well. I use one free program for firewall protection, another free program for virus protection, and various other applications for system tuning and performance, spyware, etc....

I admit, I was hesitant at first. I had questions about how safe and effect these products were. I thought that they couldn't be that good if they were free. Why would someone (or a company) produce software for free if other companies could make $40+ selling it?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Makers of Comodo, and ZoneAlarm (my firewall products) as well as AVG Antivirus make money on the professional versions of their software as well as business users.

The general idea is that they offer a fully functional version free for personal use, and a different version with more features for a price. So far, with Comodo, ZoneAlarm, and AVG Antivirus I have been very satisfied with the performance and feature set of the free versions.