Is Anti-Virus Software Necessary???

[General Septem]

[red930]

I have ran just about every A/V and fire wall combo that you can get for free or I can get from someone else for free. I have ran AVG free all the way to Nod 32 (which I am running now) and AVG is a nice product and light on resources. On the firewall side....Kerio 2.1.5 to outpost pro till I settled on Comodo. But I feel that an A/V and a software firewall of some sort is a must. There are to many drive-by uglies just floating around looking for an exposed system. To go one step further, look into a router with a NAT firewall built in. Get one of those and you "could" drop the software firewall but I wouldnt.

[TheReaper]

ok, thanks guys. i'm glad i diden't listen to that strange advice to start with.

[Angry_Games]

It's like anything else, you can get away with it for awhile but it will catch up with you at some point.

 

If you go a week, then Spybot finds something, how will you know what damage has been done..

 

this is the wisest thing in this thread

 

I am probably more careful than any 100 of you about my computer habits, and I still use Anti-Virus software (NOD32/Kaspersky). It has saved my butt many times, and if you look back in the Off Topic section, you'll see a pretty big post by me about getting infected not too long ago before we moved, and I never did find out how one computer got infected (but it ended up infecting my main rig + my server on top of the vid editing computer that was originally infected).

 

Anti-Virus is a necessary evil in today's world of emails, downloads, porno, and even legit sites that get hacked/taken over that can infect you (even if you don't use IE and only use Firefox).

[nice_shoes]

I currently use a collection of free programs including Windows Defender, Ad-Aware SE Personal, SpywareBlaster, McAfee Security Center, AVG, Zone Alarm, and Buffer Zone.

 

Until about a year ago I didn't seem to require much protection because I was only visiting trusted sites, but now my computer is now being used by others who are visiting many various sites including those sites where children can play internet games, and I think that I'm probably getting attacked pretty often.

 

I spoke with someone and he recommended that I uninstall all of my various programs and use the Security Suite software that my Internet provider will supply for free. I use Charter Cable as my ISP.

 

The catch is that Charter says that I must uninstall ALL the other software or it will cause problems with the security suite that they provide. I'm thinking that it might be worth it to remove all the other stuff and just run the Charter stuff, but only if it actually provides good protection.

 

Does anyone out there have any experience with the Charter Security software?? Does it work well??

[momoceio]

Yes, Charter uses F-Secure products. F-Secure has some good products and Charter lets you install it on 3 PCs I think...it's a good product to run especially since you don't have to pay for it (other than your cable service)

[bcbooter]

this thread reminds me of when i did a fresh xp install one night late, then before school, all i did was go to nvidia and get drivers, then steam to start downloading counterstrike, so i could play when i got home, i didnt bother loading an AV or windows updates...well by the time i got back the install was hammered with spyware and viruses;exploits.