Will Windows 7 Overcome Anti-Virus Fear and Loathing?

I hate anti-virus. There, I said it. And it felt good. For many years, I chose not to use AV on my personal systems, choosing vigilance about my downloads, e-mail attachments and application and OS updates over relying on a third-party solution to keep me free from infection.

However, once drive-by-downloads and hijacked Websites became more prevalent, I lost faith in my ability to avoid such covert trouble. I caved in and installed AV on most of my systems, and began a journey of frustration and lost productivity.

We all know that security solutions are typically major resource hogs. I suspect that, with the exception of desktop virtualization software, security suites have been the biggest beneficiary of the rapid increase of CPU cores and available memory on the average recent-model computer. I’m somewhat surprised that some software suite hasn’t tried to reserve an entire CPU core for its own use yet.