Which free security software.

[JonJ678]

Hey guys. I'm failing to sort a wide variety of problems with the sisters laptop, and am going to cut my losses and reinstall. Either vista or XP, I'm leaning towards XP because it's what I know.

I'm thoroughly out of the loop on security programs however, what should I install? Budget is zero pounds, and I'm not prepared to pirate anything. I used to use avg free, spybot and zone alarm so will use these unless other advice is offered.

I'd appreciate your thoughts, I haven't used windows day-to-day for about 3 years now so don't really know which to go for.

Cheers

 

[JonJ678]

Avast looks like the winner for antivirus then. Which of avast and avira will do best with no maintainence whatsoever? Automatic updates and scanning is fairly critical.

It is sometimes behind a belkin router, but not always. I think a software firewall is worth running on the laptop as it tends to blindly connect to any network which looks viable, I'll put Comodo on it and try to set it up so that it won't ask any questions.

Thank you for the replies

Defraggler doesn't look like it lends itself to automation so I may have to leave that one, CCleaner is interesting though. Would it be reasonably straightforward to get ccleaner to run on every shutdown without asking any questions or indeed letting the user know it's running?