"I don't use anti-virus and i've not had any problems ......."

[stoofa]

With AV software being so cheap I don't honestly know why anyone would run without it.
Heck, MS distribute some for free which is highly regarded.
Gone are the days when resident AV caused slow down on a machine.

When I go out in my car I'm not going to crash it - doesn't mean I should turn off all of the air-bags.
In my car driving lifetime I should never see those air-bags, but I'm damn happy they are there.

 

[DJDaz]

Its not so much pride - atleast not for me - its the fact that most AV software seems to have been programmed by muppets with no regard for the sanctity of the end user's PC - often its barely any better than actual malware, slowing down your PC, running tasks whenever it takes its fancy even when you've disabled as much as possible in the options, etc. preventing you doing stuff (that you know is not a security issue i.e. false positives, etc.) with no work around, etc. depending on the package. For me personally in the 15 odd years of using computers AV has caused me more problems than the malware

You need to stop using Norton or Mcafee then. I've used MSE, Nod32 and Avast and none of them are how you describe AVs to be.

 

[Danthus]

I use the inbuilt Windows 7 firewall, Eset Nod32 on all my machines and do not run with the administrator account.

Coupled with a bit of common sense that will do really!

 

[stoneman]

sandboxie

hey all first post here, hope its helpful . i like a lot of people over the years have been infected with crap,so i started to look more into computer security
and found a great free or paid program called sandboxie.the free version puts your browser into a sand box which means you can surf the net,go to any so called risky site, watch any online videos and if you get infected it will only stay in the sandbox,when youve finished surfing just close the browser and all is gone,even all your surfing activities will be gone leaving no trace youve been on the web! the paid version allows you to sandbox programs ie media players
or test keygens or what ever you like.ive been using this for nearly 2 years and havent been infected and i certainly dont surf the web like a vicar .ive put it on all my friends pcs aswell.so give it a try and hope this helps!

 

[XeNoN89]

I don't know why anybody would not have antivirus, you don't even need to pay for it!

I just have avast and Malwarebytes, and i have never gotten a virus or any kind of malware on my computer (which is now a couple of years old)

 

[Dano]

I don't know why anybody would not have antivirus, you don't even need to pay for it!

I just have avast and Malwarebytes, and i have never gotten a virus or any kind of malware on my computer (which is now a couple of years old)

Or rather you haven't got any that you or your security knows about

 

[stoneman]

sandboxie

the thing is with using an antivirus is that every virus or maleware has it own signiture and until that signiture is seen/found by the antivirus devs its able to infect you until its been defeated ie 0 day viruses.when using sandboxie for browsing you wont get infected as it dosent let anything out of the sandbox but only if you want it to.i also use malwarebytes as and on demand scanner
as it suits my needs that way another good program is hitman pro which is free for ondemand or realtime paid.im no antivirus pro just a builder skiving of work trying to help

 

[NathanE]

With AV software being so cheap I don't honestly know why anyone would run without it.
Heck, MS distribute some for free which is highly regarded.
Gone are the days when resident AV caused slow down on a machine.

When I go out in my car I'm not going to crash it - doesn't mean I should turn off all of the air-bags.
In my car driving lifetime I should never see those air-bags, but I'm damn happy they are there.

What a load of FUD. Anti-virus, even Microsoft's MSE, cause huge slow downs for any PC. Read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

Anti-virus is not akin to car air bags at all. UAC is that. Anti-virus is more akin to those traffic wombles that come along in their 4x4's and set out road cones AFTER a road accident has happened.

 

[Dano]

What a load of FUD. Anti-virus, even Microsoft's MSE, cause huge slow downs for any PC. Read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

Anti-virus is not akin to car air bags at all. UAC is that. Anti-virus is more akin to those traffic wombles that come along in their 4x4's and set out road cones AFTER a road accident has happened.

I'd like to argue the point about MSE but have seen it a few times recently myself, one machine had it's drive access speed down at sub 1MBps due to MSE

 

[Cycrow]

some ppl can do without anti-virus thou, if they know enough on how to prevent themselves getting viruses.

i've never had a virus, or had to clean a virus.
althou i still run NOD32 and have it scan regulrary, its never picked anything up.

i could prolly get away with not having any without much of a problem, but i just prefer to know its there, just incase

 

[Pygmyshrew]

Almost as bad are those who think anti virus is the final solution, 'How'd it get infected? I have anti virus installed!'

To be fair I'm a little more sympathetic to those people.

I think if you know what you're doing on a computer it may well be possible to get by without one but I'd wager anybody would eventually pick up some crap eventually.

 

[theheyes]

I've heard "How did I get a virus? I have Firefox installed" a few times.

 

[Ev0]

Nobody, not even on this forum, suggests that clueless users should run with no AV. It is strictly something that certain power users can consider doing. Those that have intimate understanding of the way Windows works. The sort of geeks that have a subscription to the CERT mailing list.

Exactly, it doesn't matter if you do or don't run AV, your choice at the end of the day.

If you don't know what your doing you could get caught out, you might not.

My folks recently came to me with their laptop as it had caught something, they had fully patched windows install as well as up to date working AV. Yet they still managed to get guff on there.

I didn't run with any av on my netbook when I first got it, but when I started taking it out the house a lot, connecting to other networks, I must say I have since stuck some on as another layer of protection.

 

[stoofa]

What a load of FUD. Anti-virus, even Microsoft's MSE, cause huge slow downs for any PC. Read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

Anti-virus is not akin to car air bags at all. UAC is that. Anti-virus is more akin to those traffic wombles that come along in their 4x4's and set out road cones AFTER a road accident has happened.

Sorry but no.
I run NOD32 at home.
This is on my i7-950/12GB machine.
The overhead from my AV software is nothing and I mean nothing.
I can run any number of benchmarks, tests with both the AV switched on and switched off and my scores will be the same.

At work and on my wifes machine we run Sophos and the same is true.
There is no drop in performance on my wifes machine.

Now I haven't tested every single machine at work running Sophos - but I'm pretty sure that if there was a performance issue some of my users would be telling me by now.

I stick by my statement - there is next to no overhead from resident AV these days.

Also - what exactly was the point of linking to an article 3 and a half years old??
I also fully question their results - 177% disk increase....umm......no.

 

[EdwardTeach]

If you are running windows 7 is it still advisable not to use an administrator account?

 

[CaptainCrash]

What a load of FUD. Anti-virus, even Microsoft's MSE, cause huge slow downs for any PC.

I've just (re)installed Windows XP on a friend's PC, with fairly modest specification (2.6 GHz Celeron, 512MB).

Before installing MSE, memory usage straight after a cold boot sat at around 160 MB (after all updates, dotNET stuff and so on) - after, the commit charge ballooned to >600 MB, which was obviously rather sad given there was only 512 MB physical memory in the first place. Needless to say, performance slowed to a crawl, and loading any application was an exercise in hair-tearing frustration.

Interestingly, memory usage remained very high even after uninstalling MSE - however, a clean reinstallation of Windows brought things back to manageable levels (I eventually settled on Avast!, which seemed to have minimal impact).

I'm not sure why this occurred - I've never experienced it before and it may have been some peculiarity about this particular setup, although there was nothing especially unusual about it as far as I could tell...

 

[Merlin5]

I get more spyware than viruses, mostly tracking cookies, but my AV warns me of the odd virus and quarantines them efficiently enough. I use AVG free, Malwarebytes, Ad Aware, Spybot, Spywareblaster, Windows Defender, and CCleaner.
Spybot and Malwarebytes are my favourites for spyware.

 

[Dewotter]

Windows:

MSE
Windows Firewall
MalwareBytes Free - Ran monthly

OS X:

Default Incoming Firewall on
Little Snitch - to cover outgoing connections
ClamXav - run on any .exe's downloaded when on the OS X for later use.

All I need now. I remember as a child getting Norton Internet Security and thinking I was well safe.

As for slowdowns, for me, I couldn't tell if this laptop was or wasn't running MSE. There's no performance hit for me.

 

[stoneman]

the thing is no realtime scanner detects 100% of bad stuff.you may think wow my antivirus has found 2 or 3 badies so i must be clean then you run another scanner and it finds something else then you run another and that finds something else where do you stop?prevention is better than detection!people seem to think that you will only get infected by going to a bad site,this is not the case.drive by downloads which when you think your clicking on something you get something you didnt bargin for,or even just going to certain site can drop things on your pc.layered security is a wise move ie good firewall,realtime antivirus/anti maleware and as i said in previous posts sandboxie.most people get infected just surfing the web but if your browser is sandboxed no badies can get on to your pc,unless you take stuff out of the box,when youre done surfing just close your browser as normal and all is gone.the days of using just a realtime scanner on its own are long gone!

 

[stoneman]

just a quickie.up until a couple of years ago i like most would go to pc world or amazon and buy the well known pc protection,but for those who are interested or concerned about security may find this site helpful. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/index.php