Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 1046584" data-attributes="member: 5990">If you know what you're doing, which is an important condition, to be sure, antivirus software is largely unnecessary.  Every virus alert I've ever gotten from NAV (which is, BTW, a bug-ridden pile of dung) has been a false alarm, and I suspect that's the case for a lot of people, but who bothers to check?  Through the various eras of infectious code evolution - EXE viruses, BSVs, macro viruses, email worms - nearly all common viruses have spread by a few simple mechanisms, so if you block those, your chances of getting a virus are miniscule.  I've never had an infection in 20 years of using PCs, and that's not accidental.   I have dealt with infected PCs in my lab in the past, but, interestingly, I've never seen a case in which the virus actually did any damage.  Now, I've seen dozens of instances where people _blamed_ data loss on viruses, but I've personally witnessed 0 in which there was any evidence for that.  The number of times I've had people ask me if symptoms like screen flickering or mouse jitter from a dirty trackball were caused by a virus has made me pretty skeptical about a lot of people who swear up and down that a virus ate their harddrive (I think this is partly due to the fact that many computer users are deeply confused about the difference between a "virus" and a "bug").   I've even seen professional admins blame their troubles on supposed viruses for which there was very little evidence, but it does make for an easy answer when the boss asks why the network crashed.  Viruses are out there, certainly, but the topic gets a little overblown, not in small part because of the enormous amount of money that's made in selling AV software.Ironically, I've probably spent dozens if not hundreds of hours over the years coping with virus false alarms and AV-induced system problems though.  I would agree that some people need to have it, but it's worth avoiding it if you can.</blockquote>

Verification