It would seem like this question has an obvious answer. Of course anti-virus software is essential in today’s world where every device is always connected to the internet. However, real-time scanning anti-virus software suites are not the best solution to your home or small business needs. Anti-virus software suites that constantly run in the background during your normal computer usage can have negative effects on the user experience and can be quite expensive.
Even on high end computers these suites can be a pain as they are taxing on the processor and the memory, in my experience many of them are so poorly programmed they have *memory leaks that end up crashing other programs and eventually lock up the system. Installing certain types of software, playing video games, and even basic internet browsing can be inhibited by the recommended settings of these anti-virus suites. In most cases where my customers have these suites installed for peace of mind, they still find themselves infected with a virus at some point or another while having to deal with pop ups, warnings, and various notifications on a daily basis.
* A memory leak is when a program incorrectly manages memory in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. In short, this causes a program to eat up excess memory on your system – in some cases until there is none left for other programs to utilize.
My brief answer to this question is: “No, you do not need an anti-virus suite or a real-time scanner as a home user. What you need are anti-virus utilities in the event that you do become infected. Unless you have absolutely zero knowledge of what you’re doing online there is no need to inhibit your system with this type of invasive software. If you’re working in the enterprise sector, more than likely your company will provide you with the proper protection.”
You can read about my reasoning for this in parts 2 and 3 as I will further describe the ways you can get infected and why those expensive anti-virus suites are nowhere near as effective as they depict themselves to be.