Wrath of the Warcraft player, AV woes

This will be one of the first posts for a very long while that hasn't been primarily about AutoWallpaper. As some of you may know, I have been undertaking a 3D animation course with ICS and in December, without me realising, my course expired. This seemed a little strange to me as some of the course (performed at home) involves some pretty heavy duty work. You get 1 year to complete the course which goes from basic 3d modelling, camera and lighting techniques, to character modelling, motion capture, bones and phyisque to lip syncing; and then you have to create an animated short. In the year I was doing the course I completed everything up to the last module (lip sync, physique and final study piece). Fortunately ICS has allowed me to have an extension, and so for the next month or so my application development must be limited to essentials only. That said, appart from the odd errors in the literature for the course it has been a great way for me to increase my skills. Why do this course? Well primarily for Asylum. Asylum is my current game development project that has been in development for quite a few years now. The main issue I was having was the ability to create and animate characters. The ICS course came along just at the right time and will allow me to get back on track with the development. Ok, on to something else. A bit of a whine, I have a friend (you probably have one like this as well, who recently started playing World of Warcraft with me (6 months now – I've been playing for 2 years), and we have been levelling characters together. When Wrath of the Lich King was due out I told him that I was hoping to get the Collectors Edition as soon as I could, but wouldn't install it or play it until he got his expansion as well. Luckily I was able to get a Collectors Edition (amazing item), and I put it on my shelf (resisting the urge to install it) for 2 months. Well, last week my 'friend' phones me to arrange our weekly meet up and informs me that not only had he finally got hist copy but he had also installed and played it during the week. Obviously I was, and still am, rather pevved with said friend who has now raced ahead after I waited 2 months. Grrr. Finally, AntiVirus and the like. I often swap and change my AntiVirus/Security Suite software for one reason or another. I guess I'm just trying to find the best one for my style of computing. A while ago I had a bit of a falling out with Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 2008, one of the updates along the lines suddenly killed my computer and prevented it from starting. After a quick trip to safe mode to uninstall KIS the computer started without incident. And so a replacement was needed. After looking around for a while I came across Comodo Internet Security. It was in beta at the time, but I thought I'd give it a try. Everything worked well and I was happy with the FREE suite. Last week it began to show signs of playing up. After doing some DVD authoring Comodo would use almost all of my CPU for a good 30 minutes or so – leaving Windows completely useless. Perhaps it was trying to scan the 4Gb files in the Video TS folder, but there is no need to use all the power of my PC. This occured a few times, once after using my VM Workstation (XP), and so again I had to find a different suite that didn't use vast chunks of my CPU for long periods of time. I had previously tried BitDefender and thought I'd give that a go (the Game Mode interested me), and although I don't like the interface these days I installed it. Again, everything was fine for the first day, then my PC would start up and the network adapter would fail. Searching the forums indicated that BD can cause problems with certain adapters when the firewall is active. Ok, so that was uninstalled. Finally, I turned to a somewhat unknown provider, at least to me, Avira. They have a security suite that has a Game Mode (albeit not automatic like Bit Defenders), and they claim low CPU usage. I installed it just over a week ago and so far I'm quite impressed. Fingers crossed I've found the perfect AV Suite for my PC.<br />