I cannot agree with you more. I’ve had both and they are nothing but Time Vampires. Wait, wait wait, delay delay delay, and they spend FOREVER updating their useless selves. IMO the MS Essentials supplied software works better and I’ve been using it for 5 years now with no problems..
These people are just stealing your money on the pretense that they stop viral attacks. They don’t tell you they stop it by STOPPING you from frigging doing anything on your computer.
WIth my work, I have to use a laptop with Win7 on it. It is loaded down with AV stuff. Every single day, I get to take a 30 minute break when the AV kicks in running a full disk scan. The laptop is useless while it's running.
Of course, the first thing I did when I got the laptop was to install a copy of VMWare on it, and installed a linux box in the VM so I could get some actual work done when the AV wasn't running. I don't see how anyone gets any real work done in windows. To each his own, but it just doesn't suit the way I work, and the command prompt is a joke of the first measure. I have no interest in learning 'powershell' (yeah, microsoft finally discovers the usefulness of a real shell that will let you script actual work), because I can do anything I need/want to do in Bash. I'm also a heavy user of multiple desktops. Windows just doesn't cut it for me.
For those who like it, more power to them. I just wish I didn't have to work around so much flat out windows-centric stupidity in the corporate world.