Cheers bud, I've got AVG anyway even though it wont update without root privileges which I need to sort out at some point.
New problem at the moment is that I'm trying to sort out linux to read from NTFS disk partitions so I can read my music and other programs/games from my windows partition. While I realise it isn't an ideal situation and that some/most of the programs wont work, I'm doing it as a sort of test for personal peace of mind. There are programs such as paragon out there but I'd like to find a freeware program which does a similar/the same job.
I'm basically trying to see just how viable it is at the moment to run a pure linux machine for the everyday user and want to understand more about how it works. Cheers for the help so far, repped etc