Informal Poll on best free antivirus.

Behind a hardware firewall or NAT router you are significantly safer, but many people don't have one of those, and are very likely to have major problems when hooking up an out-of-the-box windows 2000 or windows XP installation without hotfixes to the internet.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/19/infected_in20_minutes/

That was last year, when on average it would take 20 minutes for a fresh PC to be compromised, simply by being connected to the internet without the owner actually doing anything.

The biggest problem there is that it tends to take longer than that to even download & install the required servicepacks and hotfixes, so you are likely to have a major problem on your hands if you don't happen to have a firewall or the servicepacks etc. available on CD.

Follow-up tests this summer apparently showed that the average window before infection is down to 8 minutes or so now.

Personally I think it's a bad idea not to run a virus scanner -- even if you know what you're doing, it's awfully easy to end up with a virus, and a lot of times you won't notice any obvious signs. If one of your 'regular' programs ends up infected with who-knows-what, you may not see ANY unusual processes in your task manager, simply your known and 'trusted' application.

Many modern virusses lay very low, and are not destructive to your own data anymore, but will turn your machine into a zombie used to relay mail for payment for spammers all over the planet.

I'm behind a NAT router/firewall as well, and am careful what I do online -- but have still on more than one occasion have AVG kick in because some website tried to shove a trojan downloader through the wide-open door named Internet Explorer. This is BIG business these days, and there are countless 'harmless' looking websites that do their best cramming some extra stuff onto your computer, either directly or through embedded 3rd party advertising junk.

Without a virusscanner, I would never have noticed such occurances... If your PC successfully gets zombied, you may not notice much yourself other than a lsight slowdown in your internet connection speed, but you do end up causing a major nuisance to others on the internet when your PC is happily blasting spam across the internet for some shady outfit, helping them get around spam blocklists.

I understand the sentiment that many antivirus programs are garbage, and especially Norton has gone so far down hill over the past couple of years they need a backho to dig them back out on the other side, but I seriously recommend you give AVG a shot.