I am a member of many forums and often chat to many intelligent people and I am noticing more and more that people are not bothering with anti virus and don't seem to be having any problems as long as they are careful which sites they go on are there many in here without antivirus.
I am a member of many forums and often chat to many intelligent people and I am noticing more and more that people are not bothering with anti virus and don't seem to be having any problems as long as they are careful which sites they go on are there many in here without antivirus.
IMO, these people are just being very foolish. With the excellent freeware anti-virus programs available these days, why not install protection. Zero expense, just a few minutes of your time to install. Pretty good deal in my books!
I am a member of many forums and often chat to many intelligent people and I am noticing more and more that people are not bothering with anti virus and don't seem to be having any problems as long as they are careful which sites they go on are there many in here without antivirus.
They are either very lucky, or may have infections they know absolutely nothing about.
Not all malware announces it's presence on your computer. And if you have no way of scanning for nasties, then the quiet stealthy ones will just lay there quietly whilst passing your personal details to the world, or planning something equally devious, or worse.
It just isn't worth the risk. You could lose a music collection, irreplaceable photographs, banking details, or end up having to reinstall Windows at the very least, to solve some "strange" problem neither you nor anyone else can put their finger on.
They are either very lucky, or may have infections they know absolutely nothing about.
Not all malware announces it's presence on your computer. And if you have no way of scanning for nasties, then the quiet stealthy ones will just lay there quietly whilst passing your personal details to the world, or planning something equally devious, or worse.
Anti-viruses are silly. I don't have an Anti-virus app and I surf the internet with no probl
That may work fine for you and may very well be something you can do without if you're the only user of your computer.
With many computers being shared by a whole family one never knows where people may venture on the Internet, or what crap they may download and attempt to install making it an absolute necessity to protect the system. I do however think the day of having to pay for antivirus protection is long gone since there's good resident freeware antivirus protection.
I don't have an anti-virus, but I use other security software and do monthly online scans. Most of the time, the things I download are only security updates.
On my own pc I dont run any anti virus app at all, but do online scans every now and then.
But on the laptop that the whole family shares I have AVG installed. As Andavari said it is another thing when you dont have control over what others do with it.
Don't get me wrong here, I fully respect everyone's personal choice when it comes to what you do with your PC, and I imply no criticism in any way for the way you do that.
What I can't understand is the school of thought that decides that an Anti Virus isn't necessary, but has sufficient understanding of the risks involved to carry out on-line scans for malware.
The point that jumps out at me is .. your too late! Your on-line scan is only gonna tell you what you're computer is now infected with.
And if you follow some of the infections threads in Spyware Hell, or any other Malware Removal forum, some of the stuff out there now takes a hell of a lot to remove, and very soon, some will only be removable via the command line "Recovery Console".
Recovery Console - Recent trends appear to indicate that future infections will include attacks to the boot sector of the computer. The installation of the Recovery Console in the computer will be our only defense against this threat. For more information and steps to install the Recovery Console see This Article. Should you need assistance in installing the Recovery Console, please do not hesitate to ask.
I just want to stress this point to any less experienced Internet Users who may be tempted to go in the direction of not using an Anti Virus package.
There are first rate freeware A/V's available, and with the amount of RAM in computers these days, the amount taken up by an A/V application is neither here nor there.
Couple of days ago, googled for a method to uninstall a game a poster had asked about here. Safe, normal, mundane sites, nothing on the wild side. In the middle of it Avast! went nuts. Ya gotta love that siren.
Point is, these were safe, normal sites, but there it was.
On my laptop I have no AV or have done for 3 years. I use FF with noscript and netcraft. Which is my protection. But i only use trusted sites. And any thing suspect will be checked in vmware. I do how every scan monthly with mwbytes
Guys, I've been using Avast for quite a while if you remember. I love it. My previous post was a gag. Notice the sentence is incomplete. Sorta like, "I'm not dead ye-"