Personally, I'm using Microsoft Defender that comes built-in with Win8 + careful browsing. Resources are already scarce on these Bay Trail tablets and I don't really feel I can afford the extra overhead from a bloated modern AV app.

And Microsoft Defender is just a rebranded version of "Microsoft Security Essentials", which was a pretty good free AV solution to begin with.

If you wanna stick with proper paid AVs, I recommend getting JUST the "antivirus" part of anything - not the whole security suite. For instance, JUST Kaspersky AV and NOT Kaspersky IS.

Trust me, a full security suite is often overkill for our normal needs.

Also, NOD32 is another low resouce AV worthy of your consideration.

Tried the Norton 2015. Gonna stick with it for the time being.

You have to create a system image, using:

1) The old Win 7 System Image tool - It's included in Win8, you just have to find it.
2) A free third party Disk Imaging tool like Macrium Reflect, EaseUS or Paragon Backup.

That said, that AV conversation with you made me think about paid alternatives compared to Win Defender, considering my paid Kaspersky AV on my other machine is gonna die in 3 more months anyway.

Best one so far (value/performance/detection) is Avira AV Suite at RM95 (promo) for 3 years on unlimited (yes, unlimited) devices. That's like RM30 per year which is actually extremely good (vs the normal RM120 for ONE YEAR).

Especially for something that scores as good as Kaspersky on most AV comparative tests - AND something you can install on ALL the devices you own at no extra charge.

Of course there's Avira free too if you can stand the ads and the nag screens.

Currently downloading the Avira trial to see if it's really as resource friendly as they say.

The benchmark right now for me is ESET's NOD32 - been trying that one for a few days and it was like I was running nothing in the background. Unfortunately, it costs like RM120 for ONE PC and ONE year so it's considerably more expensive.

Plus Avira is actually better detection-wise VS NOD32 in most of the recent tests I‘ve seen so far.

Here's the Avira AV offer link if anybody's interested: http://bit.ly/1rCcEAm . The offer was SUPPOSED to end by 16 March 2014 so you better check it out really quick.

*Holy dual-postage Batman!*

BTW, you should be thankful you couldn't install Kaspersky. For the great detection that it offers, even the AV only version slows down my main laptop somewhat sometimes - and we're talking about a Haswell i7 machine with 16GB of RAM here.

Guess what a full Internet Security install would do to an Atom tablet with 2GB of RAM then lol.

You're welcome. BTW, you should try out Avira, if even just the free version. It's really not bad.

I ended up buying the offer and installing it straight into the W4 and my older Core2Duo lappy with 1GB of RAM (read: very slow) - just to check if it REALLY does work on unlimited devices. It's working marvellously on both so far, with minimal slowdowns. It even caught quite a few viruses that have accumulated on the old lappy due to me letting Kaspersky lapse on it since 2009 - so it's definitely working.

As a bonus, I get the paid version of Avira for Android too, even if I really don't do Android AVs.

So far, for RM30 per year for 2 computers (plus a third one in 3 months and whatever else device I'm going to be buying in the span of the following 3 years) I'm not really complaining. Maybe I should even get another 3 year purchase on my spare email address, though I really doubt it works that way.

I just checked the link I gave above and it's still on. God knows for how long though.

That said, I'll prolly hold off getting another three year key. Just in case they start to get crappier as time goes by, let's see in 3 years if they're still worth giving money to.

That said RM30 per annum for a top range AV for UNLIMITED devices is still very, very tempting.