Is it necessaary to buy anti virus?

Originally Posted by beardo

My Norton is about to run out and I can't afford it, I think they want like $60 or $70 I know there are other ones like mcaffe etc, Is this stuff necessary? Do I need anti virus? Is it worth it? What does it do? what happens if I don't use it?

There are tons of free antivirus software that will protect you just as well as your norton does, as long as your not the type to click on links that say "Naked pictures of Pam Anderson".

Honestly when I used a windows PC I got along fine with AVG, Avast, or Avira; and they are all free and do quite a good job. Paying for antivirus is like paying for weed, and/or sex; just don't do it.

regards,

dude, just get avast. its free and epic!

i have been using 2 completely free programs that both in conjunction with each other seem to work great.. malwarebytes and kaspersky..

Originally Posted by lozac123

dude, just get avast. its free and epic!

Is that the one that's like a virus in itself?
I had one before that was "free" then it kept popping up and saying I had a shit load of threats that needed fixing and that I could pay for something they were selling that would fix them.
It was some kind of a system scan.

Originally Posted by beardo

Is that the one that's like a virus in itself?
I had one before that was "free" then it kept popping up and saying I had a shit load of threats that needed fixing and that I could pay for something they were selling that would fix them.
It was some kind of a system scan.

nah avast is awesome, i got mine paid for though but it was a waste of money, does the same shit

i will say don't buy avg.. i paid like $70 or so for it and a back up disc, had them instal it for me and everthing, and like half an hour later had to uninstall in myself as it made my computer almost unusable.. shit had my computer so slow it took about 20 minutes for a page to load..

the only reason it lasted a half an hour was that's how long it took for me to be able to do anything to get rid of it, lol..

AV is a joke. People get viruses because they're dumb enough to click on every single link they see while browsing porn websites and whathave you. I have never actively used any form of virus software, every 12 months or so i install the at the time most popular software on the market, and it turns up bugger all. If you have any degree of common sense you should not have any need for AV software.

While there are some viruses that are unavoidable at times, from all my experience with computers, folk with viruses, well they deserve to have viruses because they're dumb as shit and shouldn't be allowed infront of a computer without supervision

I don't know if it's as common place now as it used to be, but the vast majority of viruses friends would end up with were due to p2p downloading, they'd see a film or game or song and think oh awesomeee, not taking two seconds to note that it was a 25kb file as opposed to the 700mb a film might typically be.

Sophos for mac is awesome