MY OH is a IT Security Manager (amongst his other job titles) - and as a consequence, our home systems are comprehensively protected with hardware and software
He doesn't recommend the "free" products - quite rightly using the "
get what you pay for" argument; even though the product may be effective and good at present, he feels that there is less motivation for the developers to keep updating and improving a free product in the same way as a company like Symantec/Norton/McAfee do to maintain their market share/profits.
I think the annual updates of Norton are often cheaper than buying a completely new product - but like most software, each version will only have updates published/sold for a few years