How can you trust a company that makes an operating system so buggy that it can even get viruses, to protect you against said viruses?
How can you trust so called 'security' programs like McAfee and Symantec to give you security advice when their entire cash flow depends on your machines getting this junk? It is not in their best interest for you not to get nailed by Virus's and Spyware. It is in their best interest for you to buy their product. It is not in thier best interest to tell you how to avoid it.
I've worked for several corporate accounts and school districts over the years than have been
immune to this stuff even using light weight security scanners. I find it flat out ridiculous that an entire school district I do occasional Admin work for running XP has been malware/spyware/virus free since 2007 even though all the kids have open access to the internet. Our bullet proof and free security method is called 'restricted local account'. +3000 effing teenagers have been unable to infect a single Windows machine in over three years. We tried a SUSE rollout and nobody wanted it.
Since Spyware/Malware/Virus's get castrated when the user doesn't have admin rights this allows us to concentrate our time on the much smaller category of rights elevation security holes and zero day stuff. Matter of fact, that's pretty much the formula got every
professional IT department I've been in.
By comparison I've done IT work for other companies where local admin rights are freely used by everybody with a computer, and the result is a couple full time people on staff spending most of their time cleaning this junk up. Persoanlly I'd rather fire those people and put the salary savings into automated software distribution. Also, working in professional IT shops were you don't have to listen to idiots talking about how Windows sucks because of
self induced problems is very refreshing. Most of the home machines I have to clean up are caused by people downloading and installing stuff via cracked software sharing. Gee....must be bill Gates fault. Also, most of them are running a security suite like McAfee and Symantec, but it's failed to do it's job. Isn't that interesting?
Otherwise, MaleWareBytes and Avast along with the Microsoft tools are the only things I use. AVG is buggy, eats system resources and is a waste HD space.