psychlist78 wrote:1. Would you consider this machine now safe enough to fully use?
NO! I would not use this machine myself for anything sensitive. Such as online banking.
psychlist78 wrote:Would it be okay to turn off some non-firewall features -- the ones that AVG appears to have?
Yes you should unless after reading this you decide to lose AVG now.
psychlist78 wrote:2. Could AVG and Online Armour Firewall have some overlapping features that are slowing the machine down? It takes about 10 minutes to fully boot now.
Let me answer this and your next question all in one go.
Short answer is yes. AVG has a firewall (I didn't realize you had their firewall also) and you installed Online Armour that would certainly slow your machine down. AVG is sort of a resource hog to begin with. I would (personally) uninstall AVG today and forego my last 2 months. I would either install
AVIRAor
AVAST FREE Just so you know there isn't any 1 anti virus program out there that will catch everything.
If you decide to go this route you can find AVG's uninstaller
here. Download it
click to start it
follow the prompts
reboot if it asks you to.
Then install
one of the other Anti Virus programs I suggested.