Humboldt-explorer wrote:I'm
Humboldt-explorer said:
I'm guessing you got a windows machine based on some of the things you installed on your list. Anti virus is good, but you really are wasting money on the other anti stuff, or firewall. Firewalls just hog resources, and are not really needed physically on computers. Most likely whatever network your connected to will already have a firewall anyway. If you had a Mac you would not need most of that stuff.
I'll second this. Speaking as a big Linux fan and something of a computer security geek, I have to admit that Windows 7 actually has a decent enough built-in firewall that you don't need to install another one. Plus, most antivirus will come with a firewall (and anti-spyware) bundled with it already. Installing all of these things is redundant and potentially detrimental to your PC. Running resident on your computer all at once, these software packages will compete for resources and preference causing your computer to use way more system resources than necessary (impacting other things you do on the computer), and when quarintines compete all sorts of weird things start happening (I worked on a PC once that had lots of security software installed and somehow the system folder was quarantined twice, and it was basically unusable. No fun.)
Instead, I would recommend installing one antivirus(spyware/malware/antiwhatever) package and enable the Windows firewall. Then, run occasional scans with another anti-malware (or another anti-spyware or antivirus if you like as well) from outside of the running system, like from a thumb drive or bootable CD - many security software vendors offer USB based packages (And if you'd like recommendations for USB or CD based software, I'd be happy to give you some links). That way it's not installed and competing for resources and you get the benefit of covering things that your anti-virus alone may not capture.
For research purposes, here's a great chart of success rates for most of the popular Antivirus, antimalware, etc: http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,iid=282758,00.asp
(Here's the full article that goes with the chart too: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376220,00.asp)
The article and chart basically illustrates what you seem to already know - that there's no single silver bullet security software package that will protect you from everything, but it does give some good statistics to help choose the right software for you.
Oh, and I second the recommendation for Gimp as well!
