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#21
Testing and trying AV's, be it final release or beta, free or paid, is sort of a hobby of mine. I test them all on a real XP x32 SP3 machine, so I don't do much protection tests for obvious reasons, but I get a real good feel for performance impacts on the machine, as well as real world user experience.
If I were going to use a free AV, it would be avast! & Comodo tied for 1st, with the edge going towards avast! because it's the lightest of all on the machine. After those two, I would go with Panda Cloud, then MSE. Panda has really good protection, but to get it, you have to use their URL filter and that comes with a toolbar, which I really don't like. You can either install the toolbar to get the URL filter, then after install, you can uninstall the toolbar via programs and features and leave the URL filter in tact, or you can choose to not install either, and just let the on-demand scanner do all the work. If you install Norton DNS, that is what I would do.
MSE comes in last for me because it uses the most RAM (65-90MG's) and I have seen to many tests in which it doesn't perform very well. I'm not saying that it's a bad choice, I'm just saying that there are better choices.