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ghacks post: "Why I decided to uninstall my Antivirus software"

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Ralf Maximus:
The problems is not viruses, but trojans imho. they could be sending your credit card details out if you're not careful and leaving them on your system for a day already compromises you.
-justice (December 08, 2007, 09:39 PM)
--- End quote ---

Sounds like some girlfriends I've had.

dlagesse1992:
When I boot Windows, I do something similar: one scanner running, and start more if I get suspicious. In Ubuntu (my main OS), I don't need one...

But, having more than one antivirus running at a time is just a waste of battery and speed to me.

Ralf Maximus:
Jeff Atwood has valid points, and I treasure his Coding Horrors site.

However, until VM support is integral to the operating system, running by default... I don't see that as a valid strategy for typical users.  One of the reasons I keep VMWare so busy is trying out new stuff I download, just in case it turns unexpectedly evil. That's not practical on my laptop, with its weenie 80GB drive and pokey processor.

If you're a road warrior, and go around plugging your latop into foreign networks all the time, then it makes sense to run the standard stuff (firewall, defender, virus scanner).

I keep Nod32 running on my primary workstation for peace of mind.  Its threat detector has triggered maybe a dozen times in three years, and most of the time it's a false positive or something embedded in a spam I had no intention of opening anyway.  But that 7% performance hit is well worth the alternative: always wondering.

wasker:
I cannot recall when I ran antivirus last time. Like five years ago?.. But I don't work as admin.

GiorgosK:
I have not had a resident antivirus or firewall running for about 5 years
with no major disasters or formats

its my personal laptop and no one else is using it

I do run Spybot, HijackThis, Autoruns, once in a while
I do use Firefox instead of IE
and I do scan my files with either AVG or BitDiffender
and sometimes I don't even run some files that are labeled "clean"

I have had to clean some malware and spyware manually in the past
that respected antivirus products could not detect
and that is when I have lost my faith in them
and gained trust in myself 

I think the most important thing when disabling the antivirus
is knowing which files and sources to trust and which not to

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