Do I need more protection than W7 Essentials??

[AWS]

Hi Gang,

I know this question has been beat to death, yet I am suddenly left wondering after a trip to the PC shop for a major virus infection.

I have W7 Home Premium w/all the updates & Essentials. According to quite a few posts, Essentials is pretty inclusive and adding another anti-virus (free or pay/Norton/Kapresky..etc..) may actually clash & either slow down and/or leave me even more

vulnerable than OEM/W7 stand-alone Essentials. 

For the record, my hi-speed cable provider supposedly have their own built-in protection which I cannot do anything about, nor do I detect anything. I run Chrome as my main browser & installed a couple of tier apps that sound like they may at-least

leave a smaller electronic foot-print: "Do not Track" ,  "Scramble my ISP" etc... So, I felt somewhat protected until I experienced my first real virus a week ago, which pretty much turned my desktop into a paperweight!! A trip to my local PC tech store &

I was told I had 19 infections in all that needed to be flushed out along w/tons of unwanted popups and bloatware which for whatever reason didn't seem that obvious to me.

The big question of course, should I really need to pony-up & pay for the most commonly known anti-virus software like Kapresky, or Norton??? Is there any decent freeware that actually work well w/current OEM W/7 Essentials like AVG for example??????

Thanks for your time,

Ovenmaker

 

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