Is an Anti-Virus really necessary?

This is not a popular question since people think that they really NEED an Anti-Virus, and I have a personal answer to it:

No, an Anti-Virus is not necessary.

That’s it. Simple as that, an Anti-Virus is not necessary for you as a user to have a pleasant experience on whatever device or platform you’re working with. A perfect example is Linux or Mac OS; these do not need an Anti-Virus and most users using this platforms will agree with that.

“But what about Windows?” What about it? I’ve been working without an Anti-virus for about 6 to 7 years. When I started working with computers I did have one, but later I realize that I didn’t trust any AV, every time I trust them to protect me, they fail and ended protecting myself. After 2 years using AV (I used AVG, BTW), I realized that it was a memory hog; sometimes it took over 200mb and I only had 768 back then, I could barely do anything, and I was forced to shut down the AV to play games or browse normally.

Later on I disabled the AV from startup, only used it to do a check on a USB drive or things like that. Then I learn how to check for viruses without using explorer, and that was the last day I used one.

For a while I was extremely careful, and today I still remain careful, but not careless. One thing I do is help people deleting viruses from their devices and restoring hidden files and folders, or fixing anything that the virus has done. And you don’t need an AV to do that.

In fact, an AV can’t do that (restore files and folders or most virus-related disasters), that’s something you need to do by yourselves, and in most cases, you’ll pay a technician to do that, and that’s just wasted money.

So, what’s this ranting is all about, you ask? Well, I want to help people feel secure (with or without and AV), and the only way is by showing ways to prevent the attack of viruses or undo the problems a virus had caused, that’s why I’ll try to write several posts (as many as necessary) to show these ways:

• How to clean a USB drive manually
• How to know if a process is a virus
• Downloading cracks, keygen, and stuff
• P2P
• Weird links
• Check suspicious files without an AV
• Trusted websites

And a lot of stull like that. These may not mandatory, these may not be individual posts each on, but I’ll try to include all those topics and any more I can think off. I may even create a category for them and continue to post way beyond these topics are done with. We’ll see. Stay tuned.