Macafee let in a fairly serious bit of malware, when I went to their site to find out about it they wouldnt let me in because my computer wasnt safe.
Then they took another annual payment from me whils still "unsafe"

Ditched them and installed Norton, 3 pc licence for abt £25 and never had any problems. sometimes think it is a bit of a nanny - but whats the alternative, walk around with no pants on ??

everyone wants speed, but you must sacrifice a little of that for safety.

The best thing to sacrifice is windows. Get rid of that and you get rid of your problems. I've never used anti-virus ever and I've never had a virus either.

Yeah but you could be unwittingly hosting a windows-based virus which you could transfer from your non-windows computer via an email, USB key, hard drive, etc.

sorry, once bitten twice shy

yes, sometimes companies are paranoid about security and spend a fortune on it - with good reason
whilst working at a software company one of their "bright sparks" ended up infecting half the company and we had a 2 day shutdown.

I leave it up to the individual to brush their teeth every day, but as Sean Connery said - "Never say Never"

Avast and AVG are equally good free antivirus software and dont slow the pc unduly. Macaffee and Norton used to be bloatware, but I understand that Norton have got their act together now. Crap Cleaner is very very good for cleaning out the pc and is free. Be careful of your passwords though you lose them as well if you are not careful. Zone alarm do a very good firewall and its free and so do Comodo. I agree the that Microsoft Essentials is very good and so is there firewall. I also use Superantispyware once a week for cleaning out the crap..cookies etc. Again its free. If you want to cut down the adverts use Simple Adblock which has a free version. After using it for a while I decided to pay for the full version for 2 pc's. Never regretted it. For searching the internet in privacy use DuckDuckGo, no Google or whatever spying on you and tailoring the adverts to follow you. Hope this is useful to those thinking of making changes in the future to their systems.

Hi guys!
I'm new on the forum and was scanning it (found tons of useful info), and I just could not pass up the opportunity to put my 2 cents in - old thread or not.
I can't say I'm a super expert, definitely above average user - I can set up a computer from scratch, and I have kept my computers running smooth and virus-free for... oh, probably close to 20 years.

Three things are a must:
1) a good firewall - now I use PC Tools (make sure you install just the firewall, no extras). Freeware. One of the best on the market. Doesn't eat up memory, very flexible and highly customizable.
(Before I used Tiny Personal Firewall - oh, how mad I was when it got discontinued and I couldn't make it work on WinXP! Really tiny (it fits on a floppy - if you all remember what it is), very powerful. Well, either with TPF or with PC Tools my computers always test as being in stealth mode. You know there are reputable sites that do this kind of testing, right? If you don't - basically it's just testing a computer for vulnerability to various "things" trying to get into your computer and do "things" TO it.
2) Spybot Search & Destroy - rids the computer of adware/spyware and such. Freeware. One of the best on the market. It can also immunize your OS from contracting spyware and adware and protect it to some (very good) extent. Memory usage is negligible.
Now, all that said, if you have a computer that has been used for 2 years or more, it can be so loaded by all them 'wares, that Spybot will require a reboot and will take some hours scanning it (you must make sure that you sleep mode is disabled before you install it.) Happened to my neighbor's 5-year old computer, which did have AVG installed.
3) Now and then a complete scan by antivirus. I use Kaspersky (CureIT utility) - it's a small .exe file, free for personal use. It's "good" for maybe a week, doesn't have an option for update, so once it's served the purpose, chunk it, download a "fresh" one. In all these years of dealing with computers, I've used a resident antivirus for less than a year 10 years ago; tried Avira, Avast, AVG, some others maybe 5 years ago, didn't like any of them. If I download a bunch of "stuff" from new or suspicious sources, I might scan every day or (selectively, just the downloaded files) as I download and before opening them; otherwise - once a month or less. I find little something maybe once a year and I've never had a computer blocked by viruses. I must add that a few Kaspersky has found "stuff" on other people's computers who use AVG a few times.

I don't even remember about Win.95 and earlier versions, but starting with Win2K and on, the first thing I do on new install is disable Windows' firewall and updates. Also (via firewall), I block internet access to all software that doesn't need internet connection in order to function properly. You'd be surprised - all software (well, 99% of it), once you install it wants to get online! If I want an update (which, frankly, happens rarely), I take down my firewall for a minute, and do it, otherwise they don't have my permission to talk to anybody behind my back.

Requires a little work and a bit of knowledge about what you're doing... To me it seems simple and efficient, to my neighbor (the one with that 5-year-old comp) it seems Japanese. Well, she has trouble understanding where her files get saved when she downloads something... So my method is probably too troublesome for most people. I'm sure there are simpler ways to do the same thing - just Spybot & resident antivirus.

What do you think? Am I going from Paris to London via Alaska?

I'm slightly surprised by this. Tiny Personal Firewall was bought by Kerio and developed for a short time into (still free) Kerio Personal Firewall - which then got turned into a paid-for product.

The last free version of KPF (2.1.5) is still widely available on the net and rightly remains popular to this day. And works absolutely fine on XP.

Yes, I know that there is some software based on TPF firewall. I did look at it (I don't remember much, it's been a while), and it did not seem quite the same. Or maybe I looked at the wrong thing, who knows now.
As I mentioned before, I am not a pro, so I might have missed something.

Does KPF 2.15 work on 64-bit systems? My new laptop came with Windows 7, and I added 32-bit XP to it as well. Mostly I use XP, but occasionally I need 7 as well.

Honestly don't know I'm afraid, never tried it.

No good for my macbook pro though...
The amount of dodgy sites I end up on I'm surprised I haven't been a victim of any sorts...

but you ended up locked in here

I'm having difficulties reading your post... must be my eyesight!

From personal business experience running pcs, portables etc
for the typical home users, there is NO need to install anti-virus software - its one of the greatest hoaxes of all time
a few simple rules..
Only accept documents via a hotmail address (they scan documents for virus)
Remove 'Java' from your machines
Disable HTML formatting in your email
Use Firefox with adblock
Don't visit porn sites...
Dont let your kids use the computer without parental control

95% of time spent on the internet is for porn!!!

God, I am missing out