My feeling is, and my (extensive) computer experience has been, that if you use a good anti-virus program, have a good firewall in place, keep your Windows patches up to date, and don't visit or download from questionable sites, viruses are not a significant worry.
In the last 10 years or so, during which the several computers in my house have received extensive use, most of it on the internet, I think there have only been two instances of virus infections that were not blocked at the moment of potential introduction. In both cases they were due to Windows or Internet Explorer vulnerabilities for which patches had not yet been released. They were detected within another day or two by the anti-virus program, when updated definitions were released, and no harm was done.
FWIW, I use the NOD32 anti-virus program. I use a SonicWall hardware firewall, which costs $450 but provides business-class protection for my entire LAN, with no performance impact on the computers. I also use Firefox 3 for web browsing, which is both better and safer than IE (as well as being much better than earlier versions of Firefox).
I set Windows to notify me when updates are available, rather than automatically downloading and installing them. I then use Microsoft Update to update manually. I believe that setting for automatic download and silent updating sometimes results in the process being delayed, for days or weeks. I know that was the case when XP Service Pack 3 was released.
I also regularly (perhaps once a month) use an imaging program to create an image of my entire "c" partition (in addition to doing backups of data files daily), so that if an infection were to occur I could simply reformat, restore the image, restore the data backups, and be back in business in less than an hour.
I consider all of these things to be basic to any serious use of a computer. But my observation has been that probably 95% of all computer users don't follow these or similar practices, which is why virus-writers, cybercriminals, botnets, etc., have proliferated.
Regards,
-- Al
In the last 10 years or so, during which the several computers in my house have received extensive use, most of it on the internet, I think there have only been two instances of virus infections that were not blocked at the moment of potential introduction. In both cases they were due to Windows or Internet Explorer vulnerabilities for which patches had not yet been released. They were detected within another day or two by the anti-virus program, when updated definitions were released, and no harm was done.
FWIW, I use the NOD32 anti-virus program. I use a SonicWall hardware firewall, which costs $450 but provides business-class protection for my entire LAN, with no performance impact on the computers. I also use Firefox 3 for web browsing, which is both better and safer than IE (as well as being much better than earlier versions of Firefox).
I set Windows to notify me when updates are available, rather than automatically downloading and installing them. I then use Microsoft Update to update manually. I believe that setting for automatic download and silent updating sometimes results in the process being delayed, for days or weeks. I know that was the case when XP Service Pack 3 was released.
I also regularly (perhaps once a month) use an imaging program to create an image of my entire "c" partition (in addition to doing backups of data files daily), so that if an infection were to occur I could simply reformat, restore the image, restore the data backups, and be back in business in less than an hour.
I consider all of these things to be basic to any serious use of a computer. But my observation has been that probably 95% of all computer users don't follow these or similar practices, which is why virus-writers, cybercriminals, botnets, etc., have proliferated.
Regards,
-- Al