h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I notice that Comodo Free is a firewall and antivirus package. I assume this means I should uninstall AVG if I go down this route.

up to you.
I know many people advise against multiple AV but I run Comodo and Avast antivirus (better than AVG ) together and not had any problems.

Well, I installed Comodo and tried to play one of the games. The game got part way through loading and then exited without warning and without any error message. ZoneAlarm may have slowed the game down, but it never caused this kind of problem. I'm going back to ZoneAlarm. At least I can deal with what that throws at me.

ah, that's because Comodo learns, it will have popped up a dialogue in the background the first time each piece of software is run asking you if the game is OK to alter reg settings, connect to the internet or whatever else it is doing.

As I say, it is more powerful but also more techy - it ain't just install and go. ZA assumes lots of stuff. Comodo doesn't.

Comodo kept doing pop-ups about stuff being isolated and did I want them left in the Sandbox, all of which meant nothing to me. A tutorial would have been useful before it started doing things to my applications.

I may try it on my laptop, which only has the MicroSoft Windows 7 firewall at the moment. Once I've got the hang of things on there, I should be more comfortable about having it on my PC.

it ain't for everyone, and it can be annoying when you first install something. Stuff being isolated and left in the sandbox? Doesn't say that on mine - just stuff about do want this to acces that or control the other. What mode were you running the various components in?

Mode? What do you mean 'mode'? (We'll leave median out of this! ) I just downloaded it, installed it and restarted my PC. I wasn't given any 'mode' options, so it was whatever the application defaults to.

I had a problem with my PC slowing down because of the Windows Update process ... see here ... http://www.motherboardpoint.com/wuauclt-exe-hogs-cpu-t161779.html

I used to use the "inform me when updates are available option" rather than the auto-download.

I've had auto-download turned off for as long as I can remember. I think I even have my PC set to not tell me about updates. My laptop tells me, but I decide what to do about the updates.