They don't plant a virus in your system, BUT some of these virus program are FREAKING HUGE.., and do a number on your CPU at times!

My wife's laptop (an HP Pav) has Norton.., but with all the other BS HP has running (that you can't shut off) the CPU gets bogged down a lot. Espcially when Norton is trying to run tasks then suddenly the HP Desktop Manager has to run something. You can almost smell the smoke coming off the RAM! When we bought this laptop 2 gigs was the standard in RAM.., but in the computer world that changes every 30 days! Now units with 4 gigs are popping up everywhere!