My laptop came with a 90 day trial of Norton Internet Security and i am coming to the end of the trial soon.

I always used to hate Norton back in the days of my PentiumII running Win98FE but NIS seems to run fine under Vista, virtually no input or tweaking required by me, have never needed to answer a single question from the firewall, and according to www.grc.com I am totally stealthed.

Now, Bitdefender Total Security 2008 has caught my eye, £31.

Anyone have any opinions on Bitdefender? compared to NIS ?

Seems to have everything I need, antivirus, antispam (though I use Mailwasher), antiphishing, firewall etc

The only thing I am doubting really is uninstalling NIS ...

In the old days I had all the problems, the uninstaller needed its own uninstaller/cleanup program, plus a couple of pages of registry entries needed to be consulted to remove all the Norton garbage and even then the protected 'bin was still in place till I installed norton and uninstalled it totally for a second time !

I really have no problems with NIS at the moment, but feel strangely wrong for even considering giving them money for such bloated software.

Of course should I uninstall norton and find bitdefender is worse, or its firewall wants to ask me questions every time i launch a program (like zonealarm), well that would suck !