It's interesting...I've been doing an experiment. So far, in the three months since I reimaged my system back to Windows 7, I've not installed an antivirus application. "WHOAH! That's CRAZYPANTS!" you say. Here's the thing...I've been able to run my system at full-bore speeds. I've got MANY layers of JavaScript blockers going on my browser of choice (Chrome, in this case). I've modded my hosts file to have over 39K entries of blocked malicious sites and I add to it just about every day. I run a malware scanner ever so often, usually once a week with nary a nasty other than a couple of tracking cookies.
Honestly, I find antivirus software to be bigger hassles than the majority of viruses (other than the REALLY nasty ones that require scorched earth methods). Symantec/Norton and McAffee are, themselves, viruses – one of the banes of my work laptop experiences is the Symantec Endpoint ridiculousness that is installed. Whomever configured it was the devil, as it will, randomly, throughout the day decide it needs to scan, no matter what I’m in the middle of doing, and will – sometimes, if it’s bored – run the scan a couple of minutes down to 30 seconds apart. This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t give itself full priority, shoved what you were working on to the background and do it’s thing. While this may not be Symantec’s fault, they get the blame for writing this bloated warthog of an application that chews up 500+MB of RAM on a system only graced with 4GB. Avira blew their chance with me when they started being SEVERELY obnoxious with the popups pushing you to purchase a paid copy of the software and all hope for them was lost when I decided to uninstall it and instead of running the uninstaller, it downloaded and launched the updated version of the software. Talk about virulent behavior. Honestly, the best I’ve used is Avast, but even it taxes my system at random times enough to be severely annoying at best and production killing at worst – and this is on a 3.9GHz hexcore with 20GB RAM, so if it grinds THAT to a halt, there’s something fundamentally wrong.
So, Mr. Flying Without a Net, why do you feel safe without any antivirus software on the most susceptible OS known to man? Honestly, I've changed my computing behavior. I rarely download anything from the net anymore that isn't a purchase from a reputable vendor. I visit "normal" sites -- the exception being a TV viewing site that necessitated the modded hosts file to begin with (if you’ve not encountered 23 popups within a 10 seconds span, you haven’t lived) -- and I never do anything unexpected... So far, I've managed to stay clean. Now, I consider myself lucky in this regard and know that if something goes *bing,* it will go *bing* in a big way. That said, walking the straight and narrow has done wonders. Additionally, the use of firewalls – multiple layers has made life easier.
I will recommend a modded hosts file, in general, though, simply because it has sped things up immensely to have all the ad-pushing sites stopped dead so it actually loads CONTENT on a website rather than a ton of ads. I’ve found ad-heavy sites will load orders of magnitude faster.
So you know – for hosts file replacement goodness, go here:
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
Do I think I’m 100% safe? Not a chance. This is Windows. Do I think that behavior modification has made a world of difference? You betcha. Would I recommend this to others? I guess it depends on the person. If you can’t live without certain high risk behavior that tends to result in viruses being strewn throughout your system, then I wouldn’t choose this route. Again, it also comes from experience and knowing how to avoid certain fast-tracks to infection. We’ll see how long this age of antivirus-free tranquility lasts…
