Oli's right, I detest Internet Explorer. The risks of using it out way any benefits (and, frankly, there are no benefits).

I did use Firefox for a while, but even that became a bit heavy. I still use it, though, for some more technical tasks when I have to work with source code. I LOVE Chrome, and it's my everyday browser. It's slim, sleek, and fast. It can take up a lot of hard drive space, though, as it caches -- one of the reasons why it's so fast.

However, I'm not sure if it's a Chrome problem or something else, but my Flash crashes on me too often -- it could be the Facebook game I play (that's when it happens mostly), but I'm not sure.

For years I paid for McAfee (because it was the only thing at the time that cured a serious virus I had). But it's very bloated and slows everything down. Norton is even worse. Like I12, I've been using MS Essentials and love it (go figure, a M$ program I like!). It doesn't slow anything down, and I have yet to run into a problem. I also run Spybot Search & Destroy in the background to prevent malware. It's also recommended.