I've been running this computer for 4 years now and I've never had a virus problem that I know of. I have NEVER run any sort of antivirus. I usually reformat every 2 years or so. I'm under the impression that you have to be pretty stupid to actually get a malicious virus, am I wrong? For that matter, how does one actually even get a computer "virus"?

I hardly use anti-virus software. For my general use, the only ways I could get a virus are clicking on some of the spam in gmail and opening an attatchment, or through pirated downloads. I'd say that's where the majority come from now.

Stick to scene releases if you ever download stuff, and you really should be fine as long as you don't open emails from people you don't know and don't have attachments automatically open.

Sure common sense will stop most viri from getting you, but it is always good to have a free anti virus like Avast! running.

I stopped using AV stuff for a while since AVG was screwing with the networking even when you disabled all the networking features of AVG, this was causing problems in Source engine games online.

I started using MS' AV scanner but it's a real CPU hog. Disk writes are at least 3x as slow if not more (at least when using Visual Studio to save files) and even if I set it to idle priority to try and keep the system responsive it still manages to cause background apps such as my IM and IRC clients to become unresponsive and disconnect from the network repeatedly. Very annoying. I tend to turn it off completely except for the network filter driver when I play a game now.

Make sure you're behind a firewall (most home routers have this functionality).

I've never used AV on my personal computers...which was pretty stupid early on. Once I got older and started, uh, controlling my online behavior I didn't have any more problems.

I've recently started switching users at work from Trend Micro to AVG. Trend Micro's real-time scan was killing performance on the machines. AVG is free and works well for us. I use it on my personal servers at home as well.

I'm still using Trend Micro on the work servers, but that'll probably change soon as I've had to permanently disable the real-time scan on the Terminal Server because it was preventing users from being able to log on (after so many users). I have a box in front of the work servers that handles AV/Spam/Polices, etc anyways, so the work servers were just wasting resources on this anyhow. I'll probably end up loading AVG on them as well just to be safe though.

I find Avira to be the perfect antivirus solution.

Don't forget, you can get virus'/spyware from browser exploits too. Make sure your browser has the latest updates (especially if you are still using IE).

Firefox is the latest update to IE.

(Or Chrome, or Opera, or just about any browser that's not IE based really.)

If you have to ask if you need an anti-virus, you probably do.

I don't have anything running as real-time, I only do scans maybe once a year, if I feel like it. Haven't found anything in years.

I've not had any problems. I run Avira and scan once a month or so. before that I ran a combo of Norton Corporate and ThreatFire. Never any virus issues.

Make sure everything you use has the latest updates.

I don't mean to derail this into the correct plural of virus, but seriously... Virus'? In what way could that possibly be a plural? That's worse than virii.