One of my customers runs their small business of a dozen PCs and laptops with AVG Anti-Virus and ZoneAlarm firewall. They've been doing that for quite some time now and have not had any security problems that I am aware of, although the guy that does those installs is fairly IT-literate and I don't know whether he has to spend much time configuring them.

We only sell Norton Internet Security (in my opinion, it's a lot easier to set up and maintain than McAfee SecurityCenter) and we've found that the 2008 version is a lot "lighter" and starts up and runs faster than the 2006 and 2007 versions. It's a good job too because I was getting fed up with those earlier versions being so resource-hungry and I was about to start looking for an alternative suite for our home users and small business clients. But they really have seen the light with Norton Internet Security 2008 (although the online updates now take longer than they used to). It's even perfectly happy on my Pentium III 1.1GHz test PC.

For home users that buy systems from us and want a firewall that they don't pay anything for, we certainly wouldn't leave them with the built-in Windows XP firewall. That is very basic and only stops some problems coming in. However, if you do pick up some spyware (which really isn't that difficult), then it doesn't check anything going out and so the XP firewall is a bit of a false sense of security really.

For those customers, we recommend (Sygate) Kerio Personal Firewall 4. I can't say that I've done much extensive testing on it but I do know that the numerous PCs that we've been involved with installing it on have not had any problems since it's been put on. It has all of the features that an average home user might need but it's also extremely easy to install, configure and maintain. It generally works straight "out of the box" and, if you choose the 'quiet' mode during the installation, it makes pretty much all of the future decisions about access on its own - no annoying prompts all the time saying "is this allowed" or "you are trying to do something which we aren't sure about" or "this particular IP address is trying to access your PC". Sure, you can have all of those messages if you want but, if you aren't very technical, you should be able to leave them disabled and be quite comfortable that Kerio Personal Firewall is smart enough to work out what makes sense.

These are comments based on my own experience of popular products over the past 2 or 3 years and do not represent recommendations of D-A-L.com.