Steve Gibson and Gibson Research has been around computers since the days of the IBM XT. I have used his product called Spinrite since he released it for the XT's and love it. It is the best Harddrive testing and recovery tool I have ever used for the money.
He is very savvy in the Security Arena as he has been doing quite a bit of research since his site was hacked a few years back. He is one of the last few remaining Assembler programmers. Not many left, since most people migrated to C and C++, but I digress.
As far as virus packages I have used a lot of them. AVG is a very good product as well as McAfee and Norton AntiVirus. AVG has less overhead and thus is less invasive. McAfee and Norton are notorious, as of late, for slowing down the OS (operating system). I currently run Norton's Antivirus in combination with ZoneAlarm which works well with the software packages I use. I've gotten used to the combination and I am not interested in making any changes.
Unless you are using a hardware appliance especially for firewall protection (ex. Cisco Pix Firewall or Nokia) you truly don't have much in the way of a firewall. NAT routers give some protection against the basics, which is ok for the home users who just read e-mail and surf. If you run a business from your home, then hardware appliances become more important to your systems safety.
Script Kiddies, not the professional hackers, are the ones who most often go after home users. There just isn't enough in the average home user systems to warrant a pro going after it, so the extra (ie expensive) hardware is not necessary.
