Running without external antivirus and firewall program

Are antivirus and firewall programs outdated species and belonging to the past?

I just baught this very nice Acer 5940G. Highly recommendable ! Where can you get a similar speced i7 machine for 770 Euro ?

It has McAfee preinstalled. Now my wife, which is a super super user, told me that the latest version of McAfee made her old PC run slower ( "made" means she swapped to another antivirus program ). Any body have experienced this ?

That made me reconsider the whole issue about antivirus and firewall protection. Back in the old W2K days I only used Norton Internet Security 2000 - strickly firewall -if you take care of which emails to open, and which web sites to visit, no problem - but Firefox and Outlook takes care of that now.

Anyway - I decided to try a free antivirus and firewall - Comodo, very flexible and perhaps too advance for me - when it began to "fix" some critical non-vira files in the system I disinstalled. ( Probably my own fault to set risk level too high though ).

As an experiment - Decided to uninstall all external antivirus and firewall programs and use only Windows 7 Firewall and the Defender. Who is the best to protect Windows own critical files and the file system ? W7 dosnt allow a change to the registry without worning you, and dosnt allow change of critical files either. Windows is updating anyway - so skipping external antivirus program is one less update - plus I feel that external antivirus programs have reached a point, where they are more a burden than a help.

After disinstalling McAffe, it seems like ( I write "seems" since this has not been trible checked, but W7 was running rather slow before the uninstall ) Windows menu system is running faster ( W7 is accessing the disk very frequently to load menues etc, huge icons and complex graphics ) . Suppose McAfee hooks the disk - which would explain why W7 is running slower under McAfee - McAffee seems to be scanning every single bit red/written from/to the disk - also the Windows menus, graphics etc which Windows knows are virus free ............. I havnt got any problems so far - Firefox is scanning while downloading files- it didnt do that before the uninstall of McAfee, my conclusion is that McAfee ( and other external antivirus programs ) disables Firefox scanning and takes over.

First thing which happend was the Windows firewall detected a program trying to access the internet - now McAfee didnt warn about this !

Interesting this - havnt seen this before, as antivirus programs disable the Windows firewall ............ have we missed something here - why use an external firewall application when W7 has one perfectly build-in ??

Even uninstalling McAfee, it left a small piece of it self - the Security Scanner Plus - it says its free. From time to time it pops up and ask if you want to security scan the system - this takes less than 30 sec including a small update of the definitions. What a releaf compared with the heavy virus scan by external virus applications. This virus scan looks very similar to the Windows Defender scan - which is build in ....

For the risky surfing - I have installed VMWARE 7.0, with a XP SP3 Lite virtual machine - which I use for risky surfing the net - download unknown programs to the "sandbox" etc. If the virtual computer gets infected - you just run the clone - a few secs and you are up and running with a new virus free "computer". On this i7, running XP in a virtual machine is blitz fast - you cant tell its a virtual machine you are running !

One could also run W7 in a virtual machine with Windows Defender and Firewall only - and see what happends ----

Perhaps this is a possible solution to the increasing administrative burden of running an external antivirus and firewall application ?

Just for your information - maybe its useable.

 

The first mistake you did was using McAffee.
It doesn't have good detection rates and has a tendency to slow down the system.

Antivirus solution is ideal to have in case a virus does infiltrate your system and tries to do some damage.

The probable safest way to browse would likely be to use the computer as Guest without administrative privileges.
I would think that's the only situation where you would be mostly 'safe' from viral infections without an antivirus protection.

When choosing an antivirus, you have to make sure it's first of all high in detection rates, low on false positives and low on resource consumption.

The free antivirus solution such as MSE falls into that particular category.
Avast and Avira seem to have slightly lower detection rates and higher false positives, but are also low on resource consumption.

Essentially, I find 0 need to run paid programs when the free ones do the job nicely without affecting my comptuer's speed.
MSE was also developed by Microsoft and it doesn't disable the firewall, it only disables Defended (which is replaced by a superior version in MSE).

I would venture into saying that depending on what your activities online are, you can be exposed to virus attacks at any given time, which is why I recommend having an antivirus just in case (but one that is light, effective and doesn't slow the system down ... which would be MSE, Avast or Avira - at least out of the free ones).

If you want to be without an antivirus ... then simply run the laptop as Guest without administrative privileges.
That should prevent most infections from getting through really, but it's also not a solution for those of us who are constantly doing something on our laptops that requires administrative privileges.

 

Hmmm yes - McAfee came preinsatlled on the machine.

Im taking backup of my userfiles on regulary basis anyway - so the plan is to make a clone HDD - and simply run as described, using only Windows 7 firewall and the Defender - risky browsing on the net in the virtual machine. If I should get a serious virus which can not be removed, or which destroys the system - I just swap HDD and clone again.

Perform online virus scan once a month - bitdefender for example,

If I get a virus in once a year - all the fuss about having a heavy antivirus and firewall running, mingling around, is not worth is as I see it - if its every two days, clearly no benefit.

We should also remember, that most vira are relatively harmless, and are removed during a online scan.

Perhaps those thaughts are usefull for others.

 

The thing you have to keep in mind that if a virus destroys a system, then it's pretty much your own fault for letting it go that far and could have avoided it with a free av most likely that wouldn't impact you in any capacity.
The final choice is yours though.
I only use MSE for real-time protection (which starts up with Windows) in conjuncture with Windows Firewall and have yet to encounter problems.
Nothing else starts up with my OS and it's actually just as fast as the first day I installed it for the most part.
I use MBAM as an on-demand scanner, and only if I suspect a potential malware the av missed (which is practically never).

 

You can also take images of your HDD by HDD cloning programs, say once in a month/2 months. If computer gets infected, just image back the HDD from the external sved image to restore back to a good state.

Data can be backed up with more frequency.

 

You can also take images of your HDD by HDD cloning programs

Yes, but this is a bit more complicated, and does the image work ? What if its 140GB or 280GB - not operational - you try backup a 140GB image to a file ......

My own conclusion is to clone a phycical HDD - if problems I boot from the external cloned HDD using the eSATA link, then clone back the fixed HDD. Further - to test the cloned HDD just boot it - its a bit more difficult to try and handle and test a 140GB backup image as a file - dosnt fit on a DVD, so how are you going to do this ? - made in some backup program you dont know works, till you one day have to find out.