Well i never would use a subscription based AV ever since my first experiance with Norton.
But I decided to give Nod a try using thier free trial and I saw that the small footprint and low resource usage it had, not to mention unintusive I was bought and have used it since.
It updates without freezing my internet connection (dial-up)
And usually does so when i first log on and not in the middle of a online skirmish like all the others.
Since it does check for updates on a daily basis this means the downloads are extremly small if there are any. And the regular updates show they are on top of things.
Nod is the only security software I run now, never even use a firewall anymore and also running Firefox have yet to get anything at all nasty in my pc
