I would gladly pay for an anti virus...'Cept these greedy little bastards want you to rent it from them every fuckin' year...Fuck them to the oily pits of Hades! Video games and legitimate software progs I'll never pirate, but these nickle and dime-ing bastards can go fuck themselves!

BTW, I use Avira anti virus and malware bytes, and also recommend comodo...All of which are free! I've known too many n00bs who got suckered into the "Free" Norton anti-virus trap, that when the 30 days were up, they were no longer protected, nor notified...

Not to mention that your system is likely to perform better loaded with viruses compared to having Norton installed on it.

LOL! Even with my n00bie days I knew better than installing shareware anti-viruses, hell I learned never to trust Shareware after comet cursors and MEF (Magic Encrypted Folders) raped my drive!

MEF was a program used for encrypting your files, unfortunately after 30 days, the program locked up, and to uninstall meant going into dos and uninstalling via command prompts that wasn't even mentioned with the program's website, you had to google your way out of that one!

Comet cursor was worse, as it auto-installed when you went to any site that featured them, just google comet cursor, and you'll get to know about one of the first adware/malware via java!

I use Norman Securities anti virus software. I have been using that even before Norman bought the code from the original author. In the '90s it was Thunderbit Antivirus and I feel it was the best one out there and still is. $40.00 or so a year will cover 3 computers. Thier support is excellent and it updates the virus definitions daily, sometimes more if there is something really strange in the wild.

If you want to rent software more power to you, I simply cannot agree to that...And yes, I am glad that you haven't had to deal with any maladies on your machine, however, the same can be said with their freeware counterparts, as I've never had any PC that was taken out with a virus...So far that is, I don't want to tempt fate! ;^)

I suppose it all comes down to choice, and as long as we still do, all the more power to us both.

That's why I always wait one hour before starting my PC - to give the AV updates a chance to catch up.


XD

No, it's not piracy, because A) it's an ongoing and regularly updated service requiring long-term labor, much like having a maid come over to clean your house a couple times a month, and B) because the customer knows before using the service that there is a periodic charge to continue receiving that service. If they agree to use those services then they understand that they will pay periodically for its ongoing use.

My understanding is that MSE is really crappy nowadays and not recommended (even by Microsoft!). I like free Bitdefender since it doesn't pester me to pay (I really hate that). As many mentioned before, common sense and Malwarybytes are good backups.

I think you are looking at it wrong. Malwarebytes was always "run once shit hits the fan" software for me. I think paid active virus shield is a relatively recent addition?

It came built-in with the brain... And I haven't had an infection since 1998 or so... when I was in the 10th grade and was swapping games on floppies with my friends... One of the most important things that I do right after installing windows is to disable autorun completely. A useless feature which opens up the computer... also I have an adblock plugin for the browser and never run software that I don't know where it's from. Lately though I use Windows only for games, so viruses are even less an issue.

No infection that you know of. The best ones are the ones that don't reveal themselves while spying and logging you. If you have visited websites out of a sandbox without noscript, you probably have something.

I'm curious, if i was to make a giveaway for Kaspersky Internet Security 2015 (one year) would anyone be interested (and i'm asking for those with more than 100 rep).

I would be interested. Thank you.

Microsoft security essentials and consistent CCleaner cleaning is all I use. I almost never need security essentials either. Learning what sites are ok is big too.

in my experience, the temp-free anti-virus/spyware and firewalls preinstalled on my computers tend to be terrible. and some of them contain adware and other dubious products themselves. i used to like the free avast! AV ,but it was unstable as heck and forces me to restart it too often. and it doesn't come with anti-spyware solutions, i think? oh , it does now.

AVG is a whole lot more stable, but i have to disable it to run certain games at a tolerable speed.
http://free.avg.com/us-en/free-downloads

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More paranoid list(probably outdated) of free/trial-ware programs for cleaning a known infected Win OS system:

CWSShredder
Ad Aware
Spybot
AVG Anti-Virus
AVG Anti-Spyware
Trend Micro System Cleaner

I haven't had a virus for... going on 10 years now.
Common sense, a virus scan a week and a free firewall are all I have ever used. And I do go on to some risky sites.

you could use edit/download the host file to block out or redirect all known ad or spam websites.

http://www.hostsfile.org/hosts.html
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

though some programs/malware can still edit your hostfile you've made it read-only.

some trackers and ads don't like that, but it happens to adblockers too.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=645356