I am no longer user of avast Pro, but I would like to give you my 5 cents if you don’t mind.
I have been avast pro user for over 7 or 8 years with conjunction of Outpost Firewall Pro and that combination has worked for me great for most part at least. I have 6 Machines 3 XP SP3 and 3 Win 7x64 in which 1 XP = avast Pro + OFP and 1 of the Win7=avast Pro + OFP, on rest of them OSS Pro
Now I have never compared the PC performance between all the PC’s until while ago, I’ve always liked OSS, but avast has a good reputation as well and has been doing great with OFP so I left it at that. When one of my machines asked me to update avast 6 to version 7 I did and of course there was a problem so I reloaded my ISO of the PC with privies version of avast 6 and everything was back to normal. But this is the thing I have updated one of the OSS Pro to the latest version and let me tell you, I could see the difference in my PC responsiveness. Now don’t get me wrong I understand that nothing is perfect and the developers of avast working hard to fix most if not all issues that the latest version has cost many people, but that was enough for me, I have switched to OSS Pro to all my machines and I’m not looking back to get back avast for long time if ever, even thou I still had 298 days of subscription on 2 licenses of avast.
OSS Pro is not perfect but the latest version 7.5.2 truly did the trick and I love the way all my PC’s perform. I’m not saying switch to Outpost, but until you give it try and get used to it you won’t know if you missing something that fits your preference or not.
Now when comes to firewall!!! Well you have to do a research and I will tell you I have tried a quite a few different firewalls before I’ve decided purchase OFP, in my opinion there is nothing as good as Outpost firewall, # 1anti-leak protection, customizable and once you get used to the settings and interface I m sure you will like it a lot and won’t look back on anything else.