In reply to a post by Pipexer:

I find it a problem on computers with less than 1GB RAM but beyond that the scanning engine is very efficient.

Beg to differ. I found viruses with free virus checkers that MSE have missed.

Used to laugh at what a mate use to say, getting Microsoft to keep your computer secure is like asking Bin Laden to guard the white house. Can't say that anymore.

Hmm, nothing is ever going to be totally secure, but I would bet the security of a Windows 7/8 machine against any well known UNIX or Linux distro without problem.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Hmm, nothing is ever going to be totally secure, but I would bet the security of a Windows 7/8 machine against any well known UNIX or Linux distro without problem.

Plenty of loopholes in Windows, and always have been, not saying there is none in lLinux, but lets just say I feel safer with it, I just wish I could use it on this machine.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

That's a bit extreme, it certainly has a place. Antivirus isn't useless, but it's often misunderstood. If you are fully patched and don't do much web browsing - you may not need it. If you download dodgy content constantly, you definitely need antivirus, but you'll probably still get a virus regardless!

We all know this anyway so there's no point repeating it.

It doesn't matter how secure your OS is, some users will still press "Yes" to the "do you really want to open this 100KB executable video file" - that's not the fault of the OS or browser. Most virus infections are solicited.

everytime I come across someone on the net who says they got infected I ask how and never get a reply

answer is probably some dodgy porn or warez site. another possible source is the fake software driver sites.

things like no scripts, ad blockers and common sense security settings make a hell of a lot of difference, after that is sandboxing.

A longer term solution is educating computer users that by default they should be using restricted user accounts for their everyday needs, and only switching to admin for maintenance tasks. Microsoft could eg. forbid web browsers from working on admin priv accounts with a popup telling the user to switch to a restricted account first.

The problem with anti virus software is I see it as profit out of fear, getting infected isnt necessarily the end of the world eg. I wouldnt consider been infected as on par with a hdd failure unless the infection happens to decide to wipe all your files (unlikely). Bear in mind modern trojan's success rate is now about been stealthy, it doesnt want you to know its there. Whilst many anti virus can cause sigificant issues due to bugs, performance issues etc. The latest avast eg. causes havoc with microsoft outlook. mse meanwhile insists on manual scans fairly regurly and likes to also scan working the hdd hard when the machine is idle. kaspersky is just way too heavy. eset whilst one of the better ones I feel are not as good as they were years back, too many bugs in their latest versions, some of them serious BSOD ones.

I probably dont need an a/v but still run one out of paranoia.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

answer is probably some dodgy porn or warez site. another possible source is the fake software driver sites.

Agreed however as a keen user of open source software, I have noticed an increasing number of sites where they are offering their own version of a package, eg Firefox and often they are the top result in the search engine, making it very easy to click on the link by mistake. I have no idea how these packages might have been modified.