Do You Turn Your AntiVirus Off When Using Your DAW?

[Trancit]

I never ever had any antivirus software installed on my Windows PC´s... and turned off defender as soon as possible...
I was always online 24/7 and oh wonder...
I never had ever any viruses on my system...

How can you objectively know this if you remove all means of detecting viruses from your systems?

I do keep defender active. It has no impact on my system's performance. I don't want to unintentionally pass a virus off to someone who may be using their PC without protection.

Look, the answer is quite simple...
If in 25 years without antivirus I never encountered any sudden misbehaviour, stolen passwords, stolen money from my bank account, system crashes and what not... I personally do not care at all...

There are more than enough articles over the net claiming that antivirus software doesn´t work at all and even worse that these programms are guilty of opening the related ports to your machine which new viruses can use to infect your system...

How can you objectively claim that using antivirus software did help you at all in the past??

I am no programmer at all and can only judge from my own experience...
Of course I tried here and there scanning my system after years of being online on the same machine and what was the result...?
After the scans if there were some alerts it was 100% false alert of completely save files...

For me it just works to have the firewall only active (even if I cannot judge if this really makes a difference or if it would be completely obsolovent like any antivirus "protection") and I simply do not care and mysteriousely don´t get "ill"...

I am sure that if some clever "hacker" wants to get access or want to infect my machine he/she/it will manage it and no software solution will protect me from that...

Antivirus software can only "protect" you from known stuff as heuristics have turned out as completely useless other than nerving you with false alerts and before companies are aware of new viruses and get there definitions out there and before you have updated your antivirus software millions over millions machines must have been "infected" already which obviously doesn´t happen...

So what happens here???
Is this just a lie to keep many people in panic, money making for many companies??

No clue... but from my personal experience (and I am everything but carefull when it comes to which sites to visit and which not) there was not a single time I had a single suspicion there might have happen something bad in 25 years...

What I do so is always having a system backup image ready to renew the whole system which takes at max 15 minutes...
So if ever I will notice something it takes me 15 minutes to get rid of everything harmful in 15 minutes with the most effective method in existance...

That´s my 2 cents on this topic...

[chk071]

I never ever had any antivirus software installed on my Windows PC´s... and turned off defender as soon as possible...
I was always online 24/7 and oh wonder...
I never had ever any viruses on my system...

How can you objectively know this if you remove all means of detecting viruses from your systems?

I do keep defender active. It has no impact on my system's performance. I don't want to unintentionally pass a virus off to someone who may be using their PC without protection.

How can you objectively know that Defender blocks/removes any kind of virus from your system, thus making sure that you don't pass off a virus to someone else?



I hope you see how pointless/speculative this kind of argumentation is. And, I also hope that you know what the real security problem on a computer is. It's not the software on it.

[Trensharo]

I never ever had any antivirus software installed on my Windows PC´s... and turned off defender as soon as possible...
I was always online 24/7 and oh wonder...
I never had ever any viruses on my system...

How can you objectively know this if you remove all means of detecting viruses from your systems?

I do keep defender active. It has no impact on my system's performance. I don't want to unintentionally pass a virus off to someone who may be using their PC without protection.

How can you objectively know that Defender blocks/removes any kind of virus from your system, thus making sure that you don't pass off a virus to someone else?



I hope you see how pointless/speculative this kind of argumentation is. And, I also hope that you know what the real security problem on a computer is. It's not the software on it.

I only need to objectively know that it is better than using nothing at all. Virus protection promises protection, not a bullet proof way of avoiding any and all malware out there. Most reasonable computer users understand this, but acquiring and proliferating potentially harmful malware to people who may be running other operating platforms or using a PC without protection is extremely irresponsible.

You not only put yourself at risk with that decision, but also anyone who comes into contact with any files that have touched your computer system.

It's not an argument. It's a question. Your defensiveness to that [very reasonable] inquiry is shockingly exaggerated.

You're using nothing at all, and stating that you've never had malware, which you cannot reliably state if you have no means of detecting it. None. Other people at least have some, so that they can at least detect and remove "solve problems" that are still in circulation.

Also, Defender isn't nearly as bad as you seem to think. No one believes that any one application will protect them from any and all malware, so don't bother using that "argument."

You made a statement that you are absolutely ill-equipped to corroborate in any objective way (i.e. virus scanner logs, etc.). I asked why, and your defense is basically... "One can never be 100% protected, so you're really no better off than I am."

Never mind the ethics of that choice.

[t3toooo]

I've never used anti-virus, and I've been on line since about 1996, but I let Windows do what it does with Defender. If you look in Task Manager you can see that Defender uses almost zero resources.

This

[BONES]

How can you objectively know this if you remove all means of detecting viruses from your systems?

What, you think because Norton or McAfee tells you every time it blocks a "threat" that it's really doing something? Don't make me f**king laugh. I'd have a lot more confidence that Defender was doing its job than I would with any 3rd party anti-virus application. After all, it's in those guys' best interest to make you as paranoid as possible so that you keep giving them money, whereas the best outcome for Microsoft is that you never have any problems.

I only need to objectively know that it is better than using nothing at all.

And how do you achieve that? How do you know that any anti-virus software is even 1% effective at doing what you want it to do? You can't say it's because you never have any problems because I've never had any either, and I've never used any anti-virus software.

acquiring and proliferating potentially harmful malware to people who may be running other operating platforms or using a PC without protection is extremely irresponsible.

How would I do that, exactly? I'm not in the habit of blasting out files to other people's computers.

You're using nothing at all, and stating that you've never had malware, which you cannot reliably state if you have no means of detecting it.

By definition, malware would do something malicious. If nothing malicious has ever been done to your computer, it's a fair assumption you've never had any malware on your system.

Other people at least have some, so that they can at least detect and remove "solve problems" that are still in circulation.

Or maybe that software is falsely reporting detections so that you think it's doing something and keep your subscription up to date? Perhaps I have a suspicious mind but that seems far more likely to me.

[Trensharo]

Is there a setting to stop notifications for responses from blocked people?

If so, please let me know.

[Trancit]

I only need to objectively know that it is better than using nothing at all. Virus protection promises protection, not a bullet proof way of avoiding any and all malware out there.

The keyword here is "promise"...
Go and learn a bit more about the details... there are some nice articles out there from hackers who explain in detail how they use the open ports programms like antiviruses need to do their work as backdoors and get easier access to your machine than if you would have none...

Most reasonable computer users understand this, but acquiring and proliferating potentially harmful malware to people who may be running other operating platforms or using a PC without protection is extremely irresponsible.

There is just one answer: BS!
Most reasonable computer users do not have any clue about these topics and just follow the crowd...
People like you state nonsense here without knowing about the background and try to convince others this would be the absolute truth...
If there would be truth just behind the slightest promise the programms make I would have been infected thousand over thousand times... and what happened in reality??? Nothing...

This is for me much more evidence than any claims of developers and companies...
The problem is that people got used to being lied all the time and put any claims of people having selfish reasons for claiming so over their own experience...

You not only put yourself at risk with that decision, but also anyone who comes into contact with any files that have touched your computer system.

You forgot to mention: If any word they claim is true... my experience shows me exactly the opposite and this you cannot argue away...
Did you tried yourself??
Did you collect any experience without the "promised protection"??
Judging from your words the answer is a clear: No!
You are just blindly repeating the narrative... oh my god... it´s much too dangerous... and not only for yourself... you are putting other people to danger too...

That sounds familiar... wasn´t this their same arguments the last 2 years in the real world...

[Trensharo]

Did you tried yourself??

Have I tried using my PC, without malware protection, to see how long I could dodge bullets and avoid passing malware to other people?

No. I have respect for other computer users, and what protection I do have [and use] is basically for free - both in monetary and computational cost. Why would I do it any other way? Make it make sense, please.

People are free to make whatever choice they want, as long as it doesn't put others at risk. This does.

If that person had stated that they were doing this on a disconnected studio workstation, I would have had nothing - at all - to say about it.

What sounds familiar is people going out of their way to justify obvious [feces synonym] behavior simply because arguing on the internet is fun. Using a PC without protection puts yourself and others are risk. People who read these tall tales and aren't as "lucky" can have their lives ruined by it - basically, bad guidance.

It's like arguing against condom use because it doesn't protect against "all" STDs. That's how nonsensical you people sound.

Again, you're free to take whatever risks you want, when those risks aren't imposed on others. Digital Security is a real thing, and people can get seriously harmed by malware. You might feel great saving 1% CPU today, but don't come back complaining when you find out your wages are being garnished because "you" bought a house in Wyoming ten years ago and didn't pay the mortgage.

-----

Furthermore, people complaining about CPU usage make no sense. The biggest issue with Anti-Virus programs - particularly back in the day - was the I/O bottlenecking the on-demand scanners created due to the fact that they scanned every file accessed on the PC. Most people were using HDDs back then. A decent sized thumb drive in 2002/2003 was like $500-1,000. SSD drives cost even more. Most people were using HDDs.

Disk access isn't for free, and involves the CPU. The longer it takes things to access files on the disk, the more this cascades down the pipeline. This is visible even on modern systems when you copy large (or very many) files across disks.

Once SSDs became more standard in laptops, that particular problem naturally decreased. This is why there is almost no hit to performance from most AV applications, these days. Most people are running SSDs in their systems - often fast NVMe SSDs on top of multi-core CPUs and gobs of fast RAM.

[pixel85]

@trensharo, you're making a huge mistake. You're trying to convince people on internet to do something that they will never do because of their experience and their beliefs. You can't change beliefs of people on internet. People are stubborn*.
What's next? You will tell them to not use "password" as their password even that in the last 3 decades nobody do anything malicious to their accounts?

From my long experience, Defender is doing the same job as any other 3rd party antivirus but with minimal resource usage. Except when it's auto-scanning, which I'm always setting to be active when there's no my activity on the PC at the same time, because in rarely occasions it can seriously affect real-time audio performance.

Norton and Kaspersky are two ancient and awful antiviruses. Kaspersky can totally kill performance by using 99% of resources (CPU + hard drive usage). I wonder why it needs so many resources? Of course I trust russian antivirus as much as I would trust antivirus from China. Norton seems to be still in 90s. I wonder who is still using it and why.
What was the name of the most popular free one? I saw it "in action" at other people computers and oh my, it was slowing down their machines to the speed of 386

Antiviruses are not that saint. They often slow down computers but worry not! They often have additional features that will help you to speed up your computer. Just press this button for additional scan which will remove some random registry entries and other "useless stuff". Oh wait, suddenly OS is a complete mess? Worry not, our company has solution for this to...
Blindly trusting companies that they will take care of your safety is as smart as not using any protection. The best thing one can do is not to open suspicious emails and not going to suspicious, shady websites. I think that any adult person is capable of doing that. With kids and IT-illiterates it is another story of course but they're doomed to their own mistakes.

*I remember when I tried to convince my friend to use PS to edit his drawings instead of using MS Paint. I couldn't. He never used PS but he knew that he doesn't need it. It took him years and at some point he came to this conclusion by "himself". Now he's using PS and his editing performance is way faster (obviously). But he act like my advices never happened, like he's the one who discovered existence of PS. How many people is like that? I suppose that majority of us is like that.

[donkey tugger]

I like to cover my entire house in tinfoil.

[thecontrolcentre]

[sQeetz]

Defender is enough for me. on MacOS nothing but the occasional deep scan. Since I only use legit software and don't visit dodgy sites, I believe that's sufficient.

[FapFilter]

Defender is enough for me. on MacOS nothing but the occasional deep scan. Since I only use legit software and don't visit dodgy sites, I believe that's sufficient.

do you know of any unintrusive Mac software that won't run in the background (if not explicitly told to do so) and just does manual scans (full system orjust selected files/folders/drives) on demand when i'm launching that app?

[sQeetz]

do you know of any unintrusive Mac software that won't run in the background (if not explicitly told to do so) and just does manual scans (full system orjust selected files/folders/drives) on demand when i'm launching that app?

I use "CleanMyMac X"
You can tell it to monitor constantly or to manually check whenever you feel like it. Also selective check.
They also constantly keep updating and maintaining the app. For that purpose, I couldn't praise it more.
It can do a lot more than just that, tough....

[FapFilter]

i might be completely wrong of course since i never actually tried it, but my gut feeling tells me that this is one of those programs that embeds itself deeply into the system architecture, which is something i don't want. It's also one of those heavyweight "system tools" that i always had an aversion for, since i think they are completely unnecessary bloat no one who knows how to use his/her operating system properly actually needs.
I´m actually looking for some light weight thingy, that preferably doesn't even need an installation other than a straight copy of a file that does nothing else but the occasional scan on demand just for the peace of mind as i think the built in real time security of MacOS should be enough for everything else.
For Windows, i wouldn't use anything else but Defender as it is already integrated, should keep you secure too and unlike additional third party solutions, has no financial interest in some times giving false alarms so people think they just were saved again when actually nothing happend, but Defender also does manual scans which would be nice in MacOS too.