Katawa wrote:If you are halfway decent at looking at a registry and keep your important files in a safe manner there's no good reason to use more than the security essentials.
Your chance of getting a virus is almost exactly proportionate to your rate of risky behaviour, use a sandbox or vm if something is scary, or if you have an SSD you might not even bother worrying since a OS reinstall is 10 minutes away if it's out of control.
I've lost more important data and time (especially in system drag) to anti-virus software than I've lost to viruses.
I know my way around the registry, and know where not to go poking around, too. My "rate of risky behavior" is very low - I rarely download anything at all, rarely go to any sites I don't trust, etc.
I actually almost had to reinstall Windows 7 on my old laptop because of a free trial of AVG's registry cleaner that decided to activate itself. -.- So, yeah, I've had some bad experiences with "system protection" software. My current laptop freezes up when something's bogging down the hard drive (not a virus, it's a hardware defection that was present when I got the thing), and AVG made my laptop freeze constantly. Glad I got rid of it, actually, and the default Windows Defender stuff works just fine.