Anti-Virus for Windows

One of the reasons I went for Linux was the sheer stupidity of using a virus laden operating system like Windows. Any ad for an anti-virus program will tell you that 30,000 new viruses are created every day. These include mutations, revisions, escalations, evolutions and the odd totally new revolutionary virus flavor.

The funny part about viruses is that there is no single anti-virus program which can protect against all the viruses out there. Even the best anti-virus programs can only detect 95% to 98% of all viruses. And to think that it takes a while (a day or two or a week or two) before the virus signature is included in the program's database or virus definitions. Until that time, the PC is vulnerable.

But that's just the paranoid me talking.

So with (at least) 2 anti-virus programs running, as well as (at least) 2 anti-spyware programs also running in the background, I have to ask, is it all worth it? For a while there, I thought it was. Yup, I thought having all these programs running in the background keeping the PC safe (rather, keeping Windows safe) gave me some peace of mind.

But at what price?

You start up the machine, and it takes forever. The anti-virus and anti-spyware programs have to check for updates, and do a preliminary scan of memory and boot sector, and important programs. And only then can you really start to run your Windows programs. Or at least try to make them run, for the most part the programs crawl because of all the programs running the background, accessing the internet stream, accessing the hard disk, accessing the data being read by the hard disk, and generally keeping the system resources too busy to run the programs you need to run in order for you to work.

Another funny thing which happens is when you have one anti-virus program running (lurking) in the background, while you have another anti-virus program in the foreground scanning the hard disk. This gets worse when a virus is found. Each of them will block another, because the other one is accessing an infected file. The programs will ask for user intervention to allow the other program to access a file (for deletion).

Going Linux, I thought I had evaded and left all this crazy virus business behind. It turns out that even if linux does not have native viruses, Windows viruses still exist in the system. Simply put, if a file is infected, and I copied it into Linux, it might not infect my PC, but it would still be there. So if I run a Windows program (through WINE) it might still infect other Windows programs and files in my PC. It's also possible to infect flash drives (improbable, but possible). More probably, the virus on the Linux machine would not infect the Linux OS, but it can infect Windows PCs on the local area network.

Bottom line, since I have a netbook on the LAN, then it is vulnerable not just from the internet or shared files, but also from Linux PCs. The Linux PC wouldn't feel anything, but the Windows PC would be hurt bad.