My computer is well into its eighth year by now, and I've never installed antivirus software on it. The only security software it's ever had is a McAfee trial that came with the PC, which expired long ago. I'd pretty much disabled McAfee, although it still maintained enough of a presence to shoot me with a random BSOD every month or two.

After realizing that old antivirus trials are an excellent way to make aging systems more unstable, I decided to uninstall every last vestige of McAfee and replace it with AVG. Today I ran my first-ever full virus scan on this computer, and guess what happened? I was half-expecting to unearth a laundry list of viruses, worms, Trojans, and other computer cooties. Instead, AVG found just two "threats" - and both were obvious false alarms (one was an old version of an emulator, and another was the new GIMP installer I hadn't bothered to delete).

In other words, during all these years of use, it seems that I've never picked up any known malware. This might be spitting in the face of conventional wisdom, but I'm beginning to think that you're unlikely to fall into trouble unless you visit warez/porn/phishing sites or open up strange e-mail attachments. Have I just gotten lucky, or is the online security industry overstating the risks of the average person getting viruses?

AVG has gone way down hill since its day,
i personally recommend AVAST in its place.
but thats only my preference.

The risk of being infected is kinda worse than you noted im afraid, in may cases, you never know, you are more likely to get a virus from a legitimate website than most of those shady sites, (Why would you visit a phishing site to begin with?)

Speaking from experience:

Got an FBI ransomware from Ebay before.
Fake antivirus from Google
various spywares from advertisement banners, some even traced back to the banners on MFGG.

nite, when was avg any good? that's not a rhetorical question; i remember it failing to clean a bunch of viruses and malware on my pc circa 2006. also, you know any good anti-virus software? i currently use avast, but i don't know if that's any good

bibby, are you using a firewall of any sort? that may help you some. i use a free one called tinywall, and it seems to be doing an okay job. given the tenacity of malware developers, though, i'll be surprised if this thing blocks all of it

around 2k-2k4 it was one of the better ones.

I've never needed anti-virus software. Always was unnecessary bloat-ware just eating up my systems power to me. I only ever started using anti-virus software when Microsoft security essentials came out. not that i needed it but its free and unobtrusive. Even with that though, I don't think I've ever had it turn up with any results for a scan, and by the time that had came out, I'd been using some flavor of GNU+Linux as my primary desktop OS anyway.

basically in this day and age and at least since 2004 I think viruses are completely avoidable. antivirus software might be a good idea if you have other people use your machine or you go to some dubious websites it might be worth having something but otherwise i wouldn't bother.

and don't use norton, avg or mcafee, they're complete garbage. great if you wanna have your computers resources used up by something thats supposed to improve your computing experience but i think realistically no one wants that

Other than the built-in Windows XP firewall, the only firewall I've had on this computer is the firewall that came with the 2006 McAfee trial, which isn't much more powerful than not having a firewall at all (although it was good at asking my consent before allowing any MFGG games to send high-score data to the wild blue yonder of the Internet, triggering monthly BSODs, and nagging me to update every time I got online).

I tried AVG's free PC tuneup feature, and it was able to track down 1.5 GB of junk that CCleaner missed. Otherwise, all AVG has done is slow down my already-laggy PC, and I'm contemplating disabling or simply uninstalling it.

I'd recommend replacing AVG with Avast! asap, then running a Boot Scan* before determining if your system is clean.

*A Boot Scan is an antivirus scan that happens before your operating system boots up, so it can scan files that would usually be used for other things, like c:/windows.