Windows 8.1 and Antivirus protection

Personally, I prefer Avast 8 Antivirus. Unfortunately, it and other brands of antivirus are presently blocked from installing into Windows 8.1 and if you try you will get a nicely-phrased bit of bullshit about how it could have issues with your future start-up procedures if you somehow managed to install it, which you can't at present.

Avast forums report that this problem is being worked on as we speak, but as of five minutes ago, I couldn't install Avast 8 into Windows 8.1. I don't think that's terribly critical, but it harks back to the bad old days when Microsoft got into trouble for trying to insist on everything being 'Microsoft' to the exclusion of all competitors. And I suppose I don't have to add that in the assortment of various antivirus programs, Microsoft's Windows Defender has never received an Oscar, and it doesn't prevent the bad guys from throwing rocks through your Windows.

So I'm anxiously awaiting a remedy for this monopolistic approach to security on this new flagship operating system now being flogged by Mighty Microsoft.
Every time I think we've talked them into being more co-operative with the rest of us among the vast unwashed masses, they go and revert to type and get all introspective and protective and paranoic and we have to start all over again reassuring them that the world won't end if they let us run some other program on their Windows. 

I've said this before, but let me repeat it: I don't want an operating system that only runs its own specially-designed stuff, like those Unix based ones, such as PC-BSD, or FreeBSD, or the OS-X ones from Apple. I want an operating system that provides a chassis on which I can run any goddamned program I want, from anywhere I can find the goddamned thing, and I'll worry about the security of the system, and I'll find protection from world-class providers like Avast or AVG or whoever, because they know how and they have the reputation. Forcing me to run your stuff or else tends to get your stuff thrown in the shredder, because I have issues with authority figures who think they ought to rule the world. If I'm buying this shit, then I'm deciding how I want to use it. It either works for me, or I find something which does. And I'm the impatient type - I don't want to wait forever while someone plays 'silly buggers' when they ought to be coming up with solutions.