I think I'm going to stick with Windows Defender. You guys are right, it is top notch protection. I see these ads saying I need extra protection, but I think they say that just to make me buy their product.
Of course they do. Getting you to buy the product is the purpose of advertising. Half of it uses the carrot - "Look how much better off you'll be if you buy this!", and the other half uses the stick - "Look at all the Bad Things that can happen to you if you
don't buy this!"
Total AV tried to get me to buy their product by telling me I needed to "upgrade" to get their real-time protection. I have yet to get viruses in my system. Count me as a little fool who fell for a crock. Thanks for everything. I am running Windows 10 64 bit.
Most such offers rely on ignorance on the part of the buyer. I am grimly amused by a lot of it.
For instance, I swim in the Android pool a fair bit. I see offers of A/V products for Android. Android is a
Linux system, and uses a Linux kernel. Viruses do not
exist on Linux. (There is a Linux based A/V product called ClamAV, but the folks I know who run it exchange files with Windows systems, and use it to make sure they aren't passing along something nasty they won't see that wouldn't bite them.) But there are
billions of Android users, most of who may not be
aware it's a Linux system, but who
have heard of viruses, so folks saying "Buy our product and protect yourself!" get takeas for stuff users don't need.
Win10 64bit is current. The stipulation I make is that I run the Pro version. Home has limitations on the control I can assert (like just when critical updates get applied.)
But Windows is a lot better than it used to be in terms of security. I apply critical patches when they are released as a matter of course. But I look at some of them, and the ones I've seen lately fix vulnerabilities I don't
have, because they require a combination of hardware and software I'm not running to bite. The "low hanging fruit" in vulnerabilities has been picked.
I connect to a WiFi router via CAT5 cable from my desktop, and the router has a hardware firewall enabled by default. It also defaulted to having WPA2/PSK encryption enabled by default, and all I had to do was create a password. This pleased me. When I first got broadband over a decade ago, most WiFi hotspots I could detect were unsecured, and anyone in range could connect through them.
Windows has a built-in software firewall as well, and I left it enabled. I could disable it without losing sleep because I'm behind the router's firewall, but it doesn't conflict with anything, so...
The only lack on the built-in Widows firewall is that it's harder to control
outgoing connections, but I know what is on my stem that can connect to the outside world and don't care. (I'm not concerned about nasty stuff on my machine that might try to phone home, because such things never get to my machine in the first place.
I don't lose sleep worrying about security.
______
Dennis