Hi, Michael,

I use NOD 32 from Eset.com for my anti-virus. It updates daily and silently then notifies you, which you can ignore (it goes away after awhile) or click on to make disappear. It can be programmed to do it your way and when you say...that's just my choices above.

I have Webroot Spysweeper but only activate it occasionally as a doublecheck. It's a terrible resource hog, however, so I don't keep it activated.

I use Spybot occasionally, especially if the system starts to slow down.

Kerio from http://www.sunbelt-software.com is an excellent firewall.

For backup, check out Acronis. You can do all kinds of backups and other things with it to various media. They're nice folks to deal with, too. I got a prompt, pleasant, and appreciated reply to my inquiry. My husband has my original now as I use Nero for my backups to disk since I set my new system up differently.

Hope this helps.

Sandi Bowman