said by jgkolt :

I would never run a windows machine without a firewall and antivirus. How do you know you have never been infected if you have never scanned for it. The antivirus does catch stuff but it isnt foolproof. Also for adaware you should scan for that too.

i could see a mac or linux machine but not a windows box. Microsoft sells antivirus software to stop them. Apple fixes the gitch as a security problem.

You may not be infected by a virus but you sure are stopping from spreading it if you do have one.

said by tim_k :

I agree. On my Windows systems, I don't run any AV or AS programs. On those computers I'm the only user of, they have never been infected. On my stepsons computer, even with the latest protection, he easily manages to get infected in no time. Using proper computing safety, you should not get infected. Even the best programs don't protect against many new threats.

said by pclos567 :

ideally a white-list based mechanism where only known-good executables are permitted to run.

Do you have one of these ?

said by evilghost :

Blacklist definition based security fails to evolve quickly enough and time and time again I've seen first hand how variants and bleeding-edge malware fails to be detected properly. AV software provides a nice warm feeling (at the cost of resource utilization) as a result of pseudo-security but in the end it's almost zero-effective against new threats; even the heuristic engines are easily defeated with UPX and PE.

Better to use good judgement and ideally a white-list based mechanism where only known-good executables are permitted to run.

Nick - Hope you understand this post wasn't a rebuttal towards you, I was addressing the AV fud-machine as a whole.