jonsof wrote:There is no need to generalise and scare people
There is, if you want to sell AV software, or your own services as an "IT person" - I hasten to add that I'm not suggesting that's true of Sirius... I'm just making my own weakly founded generalization...
FWIW, I have had no resident AV on any of my own (*) hosts or guests for quite some time - and my PCs perform excellently, thanks very much! I
do regularly scan with a non-resident malware scanner, but I've never found anything worth reporting. From this I confirm my belief that the performance impact of resident A/V is not justified by the threat prevalence. Yet if that threat should ever come to pass, then I have multiple beachheads to fall back on: rolling Acronis whole disk image backups, backups of individual important document folders to CD, and to other PCs I use etc etc. So, even if I'm attacked, I don't believe I can be injured. To me the whole thing is a scam: far from protecting us against malware, resident A/V
is the malware - it's a clumsy DOS (Denial Of Service) attack that stops you enjoying your own PC to its full potential.
(*) I distinguish between "my own" and "my employers". My employer uses an IT contracter and he stuffs every PC to the gills with AV software as a matter of course, no thought or justification required. He gets away with it of course because most PC users know even less than him. I refuse to use any of the treated PCs for development, I find them unusable.