sleemie

I tried to avoid this post given it's probably been asked a million times, but I didn't find anything in the sticky posts, so here I am asking.

A friend of mine just purchased a laptop and asked me if she should buy the $150 spyware/virus protection suite that was being pushed on her at BestBuy, and of course I told her NO NO NO! But she was a little skeptical and even suggested that MAYBE she should just buy it anyway. So, now I've got ALL the pressure on me to keep her system safe. ha ha. I've never used Vista before and know pretty much nothing about it, but I'm assuming things can't be too different in terms of protecting it. From what I hear, it's supposed to be inherently more secure, anyway, and probably easier to keep protected.

I've installed the Free AVG for viruses and it has Defender for spyware protection. I know in the past Defender has been pretty much trashed on this site, but I don't know of any other good, free active protection for spyware, except for spyware blaster and I'm not really sure how good that is. Which I actually JUST installed while in the middle of making this post.
I've also installed Adaware and spybot for manual scanning.

In the past this combination has always been very effective for me on XP as long as I stayed on top of making sure everything was updated and I ran the occassional scans. I just wanna make sure it's adequately protected.

Thanx