What the title says, and that’s pretty much it. Do you or don’t you?
I’ve been solely trusting windows defender for years now. Honestly, the main way I prevent myself from getting compromised is by sticking to trusted sources whenever possible. If the torrent is provided by someone who’s only ever uploaded one thing, there’s no way in hell I’m trusting it. Beyond that, it’s a balancing act.
People (rightly) shit on Windows but Defender, despite constantly flagging my windows activator as malware, is the best antivirus that’s ever happened. If that fails (occasionally I have a family member who needs help) the amazing Malwarebytes takes care of it with one scan.
If that fails, whatever—reformat. Reformat never fails hahaha.
I haven’t got a virus once in my life, and I’m old. But like you, I stick to trusted sources. Even back on Kazaa, I made sure I’m not running an exe or bat and I was totally fine. The worst thing that happened to me was fucking with the mean clock in AOHELL TOOLZ too much and it put like a thousand text files title FUCK YOU in windows folder, circa windows XP. Luckily deleted them before my dad found out. Took FOREVER with a 400MHz Celeron.
At least it didn’t infect me with CIH, like it threatened (it told me the previous clock did that if you clicked it too much.)
Just FYI, these days even a format can fail. Some things manage to get into your actual bios, or infect your drive firmware.
Extremely rare, but still very much possible.
Possible, but nobody is wasting such a good exploit on average consumer PC’s.
Defender all the way. Not a single virus since Windows 7. The thing some people don’t realize is that in order for third party AV to work it has to modify the lowest layers of the OS which actually exposes it more to attacks. You have to trust the AV to do its job perfectly or you’re screwed.
My source? Just crap I heard online before. Probably bunk. But I stand by my personal anecdote.
Not using Windows kinda solves this problem. It also solves many other problems lol
Including the problem of having too many games to choose from 😉
I have about 900 games not counting emulation.
1996 wants its hot take back
And that’s 2023 on the phone, it would like its uncomfortable facts shown.
You need to change your username; you’re not debatable, you can’t even write a coherent sentence.
Linux has steam and supports 98% of AAA game titles.
Nobody cares
Lol you do
You care enough to write ignorant comments about it.
I’ll take “COMEBACKS THAT AREN’T ACTUALLY CLEVER” for $800, Alex!
Lol, you’re not wrong. There will always be idiots trying to gaslight here, though.
It’s not evil to eat meat - - erm, I mean… Use windows! I don’t even fucking like windows, but like… Yeah, I like to game and that’s the easiest platform to game on.
Exactly this. I’m getting plenty of downvotes and people claiming I’m talking crap but when I tried the Linux gaming life, I couldn’t even get Minecraft to work. Freaking Minecraft. And it only continued downhill from there. I make no claim that it’s not possible to game on Linux, only that it’s often such a chore that your entire planned gaming session can end up being a session of reading through forums filled with snide comments from pretentious Linux fanboys instead. I started as a console gamer and the fear of PC gaming was always that PC gaming can be a nightmarish tinker fest but Windows is much more click-and-play than Linux in my-and-most-people’s experience.
I don’t (generally) sail the high seas, but I’m surprised that people don’t use SysInternals tooling on windows. Of note:
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ProcExp - A way better process explorer and has a built-in VirusTotal scanner for all running processes. 100 times better than standard process explorer. This in combination with windows defender is nearly always enough.
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AutoRuns - A tool to see what automatically runs on your system. Included image hijacks and such. This is for handling potential post-infection scenarios.
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The best antivirus is common sense. Use trusted sources, read comments, take regular backups, and use a dedicated server instead of your everyday driver. You can rely on Windows Defender or run another OS like Linux or even MacOS.
If you must download a suspicious file, check out sandbox options like Windows Sandbox.
No and no.
I use arch btwI trust that windows viruses won’t work on Linux. Plus I don’t pirate software, unless I can crack it myself using binaries provided by the software. I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
I just see pirating software as supporting a company I hate instead of supporting an open source project I like
Yes!
Adobe owes a huge part of their success to piracy. It made it impossible for smaller companies to get a foothold back in the 90s because everyone just pirated Photoshop. It never would have become so entrenched (or grown so exploitative in licensing) if people had instead used cheaper/free alternatives.
My current solution to prevent getting a virus is to:
- Go to archlinux.org
- Download the ISO and follow the install instructions
- Check suspicious-looking files on virustotal
Takes a few hours to initially set everything up, but has the added benefit of not using a shit operating system.
I upload any suspicious files to virustotal.com.
Format c:/
I sail naked AF.
Defender is sufficient when using common sense and being rightfully suspicious.
My toolbox also contains virustotal for suspicious executables/files.If you actually want good protection, you’d need tiowatch at a solution that has behavior real time analysis. But that would also interfere with a lot of programs if they employ weird/shady programming (like trainers, mod menus etc.)
Seriously? This is an actual question?
Exhibit 1:
Check for yourself: https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/
If “Protection” is not the highest score, its shit. The other two (perf/use) are not so important generally, but I would say a score of 6,6,6 is far superior to anything 5.5,X,Y. Probably also means the company isn’t a rolling rock gathering moss. (“We make AV, and we keep it up to date” as opposed to “we are a megacorp, and profits overrule everything else”).
