Deus Ex Alpha

What is the best security (anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, etc) software right now? I'm not happy with my current software and need advice from Dae/Alex and anyone else savvy or enthusiastic about this.

To contribute to the thread about something I'm sure with, if you use FireFox I really recommend Ghostery (anti-tracker), Noscript, Adblock, Adblock Edge and Anti-Adblock Killer script.

For paid antivirus, I'm hooked to Kaspersky. I've been using it for a few years now at my work, and haven't had a single issue since.

As for free, I hear pretty good things about Avira. Also, this website has pretty interesting testresults:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/

I'm not exactly sure what versions they tested (paid vs free), but it does give an overall impression of the brands available and how they perform.

Kaspersky is fantastic as a premium, would go back if I could afford it. I also like Malwarebytes as well which is significantly cheaper and also use the free one. The upside with the latter is it's designed to run with other anti-virus software. ESET is another I liked.

avast is still good if you don't want to pay but it's slowly getting more and more creepy as the years go by (aka: AVG Syndrome).

Personally, I feel so long as the virus scanner is reputable you should be fine, free or otherwise. Many free scanners now use cloud computing for real-time scanning if that interests you (something only premium scanners really had) but it isn't a necessity if you scan often and download intelligently.