Running without external antivirus and firewall program

I just baught this very nice Acer 5940G. Highly recommendable ! Where can you get a similar speced machine for 770 Euro ?

It has McAfee preinstalled. Now my wife, which is a super super user, told me that the latest version of McAfee made her old PC run slower. Any body have experienced this ?

That made me reconsider the whole issue about antivirus and firewall protection. Back in the old W2K days I only used Norton Internet Security - strickly firewall -if you take care of which emails to open, and which webb sites to visit, no problem - but Firefox and Outlook takes care of that now.

Anyway - I decided to try a free antivirus and firewall - Comodo, very flexible and perhaps too advance for me - when it began to "fix" some critical non-vira files in the system I disinstalled.

Aa an experiment - Decided to uninstall all external antivirus and firewall programs and use only Windows 7 Firewall and the Defender. Who is the best to protect Windows own critical files and the file system ? Windows is updating anyway - so skipping external antivirus program is one less update - plus I feel that external antivirus programs have reached a point, where they are more a burden than a help.

After disinstalling McAffe, it seems like Windows menu system is running faster ( W7 is accessing the disk very frequently to load menues etc ) . Suppose McAfee hooks the disk - which would explain why W7 is running slower under McAfee - McAffge seems to be scanning every single bit red/written from/to the disk - also the Windows menus, which Windows knows are virus free ............. I havnt got any problems so far - Firefox is scanning while downloading files- it didnt do that before the uninstall of McAfee, my conclusion is that McAfee disables Firefox scanning and takes over.

First thing which happend was the Windows firewall detected a program trying to access the internet - now McAfee didnt warn about this !

Interesting this - havnt seen this before, since antivirus programs disable the Windows firewall ............

Even uninstalling McAfee, it left a small piece of it self - the Security Scanner Plus - it says its free. From time to time it pops up and ask if you want to security scan the system - this takes less than 30 sec including a small update of the definitions.

Just for your information - maybe its useable.