Hi Gerry,
I almost made it down to your neck of the woods for thanksgiving but...sigh, I need to catch up on my programming homework.
I would agree with those that state that McAfee and Norton are good. I also agree with you that they are resource hogs.
What has not been mentioned or asked is, what are you using for an email client. If it's one of MS email clients (Outlook, OE), you need
a full security suite. You MUST have something that will filter your email real-time. It needs to be something that updates as often as you check your email. If you use a web-based email client (yahoo etc) the requirements are less stringent, you are slightly safer.
Free is good but it does require more work on your part. If you go with free, you need the AV, a firewall (ZoneAlarm was mentioned and I also highly recommend it.) and a couple of free anti-spyware programs...hopefully one catches what the other might miss.
All of that being said, I use the free version of BitDefender, ZoneAlarm and some of the anti-spyware programs. AVG is a very good free program though. I feel I have more ability to configure BitDefender then I did AVG. This thing checks for updates more often than AVG did when I was using that.
The only thing I really depend on is ZoneAlarm though. I have gone another route completely. I use ZoneAlarm to let me know what programs on my computer are trying to get out. My main security is "DEEPFREEZE". Deepfreeze is a program that freezes your computer. You can do anything you want to it, play with the registry, just screw it up royally...restart and it's back to where it was originally. IF I get a viruse, restart and it's gone (assuming my computer was clean to start with.) I've been playing with this and really like it. I use bitdefender to see if it can find anything, I also use some of the free external scans and they find nothing. The drawback is you have to "THAW" your computer to save any changes you make. You can establish a "Thawed" space if you have a separate drive on your computer or save files to a thumb drive or cd/dvd RW.
Well, I hope this helps some and sorry it's so long. Hope I don't get flamed.