I have been on and of visiting sites that may give you a virus or malware i.e pirate sites etc and purposely without a virus program. Silly i know. I use avast when i do. I have done this for trial periods and yet I have not had any malware or a virus of any kind. I sometimes wonder if these progs are needed. I always have image file tucked away for quick recovery. Is it that easy to get a virus nowdays?
Of course it is not easy to get virus nowadays. Operating systems, browsers, web servers became so secure that we can relax and download and execute anything we want, visit any links from letters, etc.
Yeah, even some Intel CPUs are more secure than ever. Browse away, don't fret. What's the worst it could happen?
Avast alone gobbles up resources and it keeps telling you need this and that , pop ups galore Thanks for all the answers so far
No matter how much you try to prevent them,they can easily hack into your computer,i'm not exaggerating.
I have no commercial interest to anyone, nothing to blackmail me with, nothing on my computer that can gain money, they might get a naughty film they might not have. I have not got a pot too piss in.
When I start browsing dodgy sites, I usually unplug harddrives and boot from a Linux LiveDVD.... When I'm done, I reboot Linux, then shutdown and reconnect harddrives and boot back into Windows.
I have nod32 security since v5 or so, but lately around v11 they or windows10 glitches something by startup firewall and it take a lot longer, e.g. stuff that tries to connect online can lag and halt apps. Not always though if I let it do its thing for around 10-20sec. But if I do anything sooner it lags everything.. lol that said it made me google a bit for new AV.. and I found this test https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/ Is this legit? Looking at avira, fsecure, northon. I tried avira in the past but it felt a bit cheap and weak firewall, fsecure was kind of good but this was like 12yrs ago.. I see MS own advanced a bit, but I want to have better control over firewall and what tries to connect, nod32 does a great job here, except this shitty startup service lag (cpu ~20% and eset firewall helper service as cause)
As with any antivirus/antimalware test site, I recommend taking that site with a grain of salt.... All of those sites claim to test against "zero-day" malware and "known-in-the-wild" malware....but products seem to perform differently for every lab.....