What is your current PC defensive setup?

[RTZ]

Mine right now is the following, Avast 5.0.239 Beta 2, Online Armor Premium Firewall, S.A.S. Pro ( THANKS Tarun ), HitMan Pro as an on demand scanner

[Tarun]

Agnitum Outpost Professional Firewall, and that's it.

[Ultimate Predator]

Um, pretty much just the Windows firewall, and that's it. Comodo was messing around with wireless for a while. I'm only using the internet to visit a few set sites as I'm working all the time, so there is no risk of infection. Back home for the family, its avast anti-virus and Comodo Firewall.

[Eldmannen]

None.

The operating system I use is reasonably secure by default.

If you install many defensive software, then at the end it will be as slow as when having malware infections.

[rridgely]

I like the new MS security essentials.

Windows 7(and vista) come with Defender installed, I figured since it was running by default that I may as well get a better version. MSE disables defender on installation and doesn't seem to use any extra resources. Before now I haven't been using anything at all for a few years now.

[James_A]

First, and foremost, a decent hardware firewall between you and the Internet. Quite a few ADSL modem/firewall/routers (think in terms of NetGear, or Linksys/Cisco, or 3Com amongst others) now have a decent SPI firewall built-in, but usually the one you get sent "free" by the ISP is awful (actually, most of them are semi-useless rubbish).

Always change the password as soon as you install it.

Everyone on the Internet knows the default passwords of all of these and a decent firewall log will show you all the attacks trying to log into YOUR modem/router or YOUR computer as "admin" or "Administrator".

Next comes Dont click on the Dancing Pigs.

Use Firefox, with the NoScript addon. Never disable the Windows firewall (unless you have another software firewall on the same computer). After that, you can start thinking about AV/anti-malware products.

I like the new MS security essentials. ...

So do I. When MSSE is a lightweight 9MB download, makes you wonder what those commercial half-a-gigabyte packages (that come in yellow or red boxes) are doing, other than just slowing everything to a crawl.

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