I have only been using Avast Free for over 18 years
Just to let you know, David, there are at lest a dozen other products out there better than Avast! , which you may like them.
But you have to think "out of the box" .......
No they aren't. I've been trying other products on and off for years and always returned to Avast because they were always rubbish. Even those today, Bitdefender is still a buggy mess like it has always been, AVIRA was a terrible joke since the early 2000's, Kaspersky has improved, but is filled with useless garbage, still requires account, installs worthless VPN every time with no option to remove it during install, you always need to remove it after install, doing unnecessary reboots. Yuck.
Windows Defender would be great if it wasn't slower than a fresh turd sliding down a 1% slope and if they ever bothered to fix the damn Folder Access Control. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that this feature has been broken for years, since its introduction. Meanwhile Ransomware Shield in Avast, that's the same feature, just endlessly better has worked great since day 1.