How I'm saving money this year...

I recently read a post on my favorite daily blog (http://www.moneysavingmom.com/), giving us a challenge as to what things we were doing in our lives to save $100 over the course of a year. I've been thinking... and I'd love to hear yours - they can be big or little - I'd just love to hear if you are - and what you are doing. So many articles tell you to skip the Starbucks and the pedicures, but I have yet to start either of those!

Anyway, I thought I'd share my most recent find of how I'm at least saving us $40 this year. I am a complete believer in AntiVirus protection. Rewind back about 6 or 7 years ago and I didn't think it really mattered if you had virus protection. Enter husband who opened an email with an attachment called "Kiss Me." Why? Don't know. But, suddenly, our computer was infected with an awful bug - that took me two days and lots of headaches to get rid of. And, then, about 5 years ago when we got a new computer and it came preinstalled with McAfee software - which I thought we would use for the 6 months of freebies. Unfortunately, in the first 30 days, it let something through which led to the eventual reformatting of my hard drive (thanks to the very nice man at Dell who was willing to spend 2 hours on the phone with me. Did I mention the Indian man from McAfee who after none of his solutions worked, told me that he would pray for my computer! :p) We'll just let it be known that McAfee isn't my first choice in virus protection!

So, I have been really good in keeping up my virus protection with the competitor, Norton. My only complaint has been that it makes my old computer run veerrrrryyyyyy ssssssslllllooooowww. Well, my lovely program keeps telling me lately that I have less than a month left of my subscription and I'd better renew for approx $40. I really hate that, because even though it's something I know I need, I still don't like spending the money because, I think it's a lot for what you get. Anyway, I found out today that you can get FREE virus protection programs - that PC World mag and CNet reviewers say work every bit as well as the paid for well known names! Woo Who! Guess what I did tonight? I uninstalled Norton, and have installed Avast - a freebie - that runs much faster than Norton ever dreamed of running! I also hear good things about AVG, but didn't try them because a couple of people said that lately it's getting to be a bigger bogged down program as well. It's all installed and running pretty now - so I'll let you know how it goes - but so far, it's worked just like all the reviews claimed it would! :)