Last year, some antiviruses really started advertising some gamer-friendly features. So, realizing that, hey, I'm a gamer, I might find this useful... and so my journey began.
I'll be brief:
Norton Antivirus Gaming Edition is crap. The much ballyhooed pulse updates rarely (never?) worked, and, irony of all ironies, my online games stopped functioning after a few months. Like all issues involving Norton and networking, the quickest way to solve your networking issues is to remove Norton (and make sure you use their removal tool to make sure it's REALLY gone)
AntiVir did a number on my ping, and had the least intuitive interface. The gaming feature didn't seem to help.
Kaspersky's didn't mess up my ping like AntiVir, but it's interface wasn't much better, and the default settings were the least user friendly. It would find a virus, but then you would have to fish through the menus to choose what to do with the previously found "threats". I say "threats" with quotations, as it seemed to be worse for false positives than what AV-comparatives would indicate (it was even tagging all Google Ads as threats early on). If Norton Internet Security's incessant messages never drove you bonkers, well, you'll feel right at home here.
NOD32 has been an ongoing recommendation as a resources-lite AV for many gamers. I was fairly impressed with it's performance day-to-day... once it was installed and activated that is. ESET have a weird system where you have two different sets of credentials, and it can get confusing which it is asking for when it's time to renew, or anything involving you contacting or doing business with the company. And while it was easier than Kaspersky overall, often it wasn't clear why it didn't just delete a malware object it found, despite setting the program to delete by default.
Shaw Secure may not be directly relevant to many of you, but apparently it's just a skin on F-secure, a decent contestant on AV-comparatives. Since I have Shaw as my ISP, it's free, so I gave it a go. It's crap for games. I had to turn off pretty much every active feature in the suite to stop it from making my games a lag fest. Not acceptable. NEXT!
Bitdefender earlier this year mucked up a number of Windows x64 machines, rendering them unbootable. Luckily I was playing with Kaspersky at the time. Also, it seems to crash for me once every week or two, but then recovers itself immediately. Annoying, but not a deal breaker for me. What seals me on Bitdefender is that (a) it stays out of the way of my gaming, and (b) everything else is just intuitive. I first had just the antivirus, but decided to check out Internet Security, as software firewalls are the ultimate test of intuitiveness. To my pleasant surprise, many apps are profiled already, and the program gives a brief, non-alarming message that a profile has been added automatically. Some programs need to be manually allowed, as expected, such as when I was waiting for Battlefield 2 to load for the first time after I installed Bitdefender... it stayed at the black screen for a bit before I realized it much be the firewall, and sure enough, when I Alt-Tabbed, there was the permission window. So it's not perfect, but of them all, Bitfender I found the most intuitive, and thus, was the most happy with. It's also one of the best on AV-comparatives, so, bonus.
As for free AV, I would suggest Microsoft's Security Essentials, as long as you have a secure platform (ie, 64 bit Windows, not 32-bit XP) and/or have clean/secure browsing habits (the seedy areas of the internet will get you infected really quickly on a XP 32-bit machine that isn't really well locked down). AVG, Avast, AntiVir, etc... free versions of software that have paid versions, seem to be getting more and more in your face for registering and paying, and don't seem to seriously outperform Microsoft's free solution (at least according to AV-comparatives), so I don't even bother with them anymore.
