Recommend me an internet security package!

[Carfax83]

Besides having relatively high screening rates for malicious sites, one of IE9's advantages is that it runs at Low integrity, as does Google Chrome. Even if successfully exploited, the bad guys have still won themselves a wet noodle as an attack weapon unless they've got a follow-on way to break out of the Low-integrity cage.

Awesome, I never knew that! One more reason to stick with IE9..

I'll definitely will look into 'low integrity'. I need to start keeping up with IE changes and have not given a chance to Chrome yet.

I highly recommend IE9. While it's not as fast as say Chrome, it's almost as fast, and a lot more secure due to the smartscreen filter.

The 64 bit version is the best imo, now that flash player has gone 64 bit native. I've found the 64 bit version to be noticeably snappier, and faster at rendering web pages, despite what the benchmarks state.

Plus I believe the 64 bit version is slightly more secure as well, so thats an added bonus.

 

[mechBgon]

It can't hurt to add EMET either, and it doesn't seem to have a noticable performance drag. Browsers and any add-ons would be prime candidates for the EMET tweaking, as well as PDF readers and media players that could be summoned into action via web activity.

 

[myinfinity]

OK I just tried Bitdefender 2012 Total security, and here are my thoughts.

While Bitdefender routinely gets high marks in AV tests, I can't really recommend this latest iteration. It suffers from the same problem that Kaspersky had.....that is, the performance hit on your system is simply unacceptable. It started with the installation, which took perhaps 5 minutes to complete, compared to Norton's 20 seconds.

However, Bitdefender also did a pre-scan to make sure I did not have any malware, and it also downloaded most of the installation files from a server, but the installation size was obviously quite big.

Something else I didn't like, you cannot have MBAM installed with Bitdefender. Apparently, the two conflict with each other, so if you have MBAM installed, then Bitdefender will ask you to uninstall it.

Norton and MBAM have no such conflicts.

My boot up time and browsing speed was noticeably slower with Bitdefender installed, compared to NIS 2012.....though not as slow as with Kaspersky. As for scanning speed and resource usage, both were quite good. I did a full scan in approximately 13 minutes (main drive has over 220GB of data), and general memory usage was low.

In the end, I ended up uninstalling Bitdefender (even that took a few minutes!) and switching back to NIS 2012. The advantages Bitdefender possesses over Norton such as a slightly better on demand scanning and heuristics etc aren't enough to make me turn a blind eye to the performance hit it incurs.

And Norton has it's own advantages, such as a much smaller performance hit and better overall protection, according to AV-Comparatives at the least. At any rate, NIS 2012 is brand new and still has a few bugs to iron out. It will only get better as time goes by, so I've made up my mind to stick with it

Thanks for your suggestion. I was about to upgrade to Bitdefender 2012 Total security but I will stay on BitDefender Internet Security 2011.