Vista vs Virus Protection

Factual Questions
1

I bought a brand new computer with Vista Premium Home Service Pack 1

It comes with pentium dual cpu 2ghz processor
2gb RAM
500gb storage

I took it out of the box and oh my God was it slow. Rather slow on the Internet
After Googling around I found that it could be the virus dector. I took Norton (came with the computer) and disabled it. I disabled everything I could find. Still nothing.
Then I uninstalled Norton and restared. Boy then did Vista work great. So I installed AVS the free antivirus I saw listed on this site.

Same thing again. I took me SIX minutes to download the main page of Google.

So I uninstalled AVS and back to the Quick Vista

OK I have looked online and other users have had this but the only answer I find is uninstall the virus protector.

I am not crazy about not having a virus protector on the machine. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just disable it, but I have to physically uninstall it.

Any ideas on how to get some kind of antivirus protector on this?

2

I’ve heard that the new AVG 8.0 is a bit of a memory hog, especially the process avgrsx.exe.

Here’s some helpful information in a forum post on tweakguides.com for “cleaning it up” a bit.

You can also try Avast! which, as far as I’ve read, is on par with AVG as “the” free antivirus software.