Rony Bill wrote:
Fourth, I know a Windows user who has accidently used his OS ('98) without any antivirus loaded for more than a week and he has been doing online trading on a cable internet. When the av was loaded, no viruses were found. I know another '98 user whose machine is an old Pentium 233 and his antivirus had expired a few years ago. He uses his system everyday to make calls to his children in the US. He had no viruses. Net security depends a lot on what sites the user surfs and what security levels are set in his browser. A good firewall and live anti-spyware does a great job in windows for unwanted attacks.
To support your point, in my own case, until the end of last year, I used to run M$ Windows Me RC3 (a relatively stable release of Windows Me, whose production release was a disaster > legal copy from Microsoft I was an official beta tester) with AVG & Wyvernworks Firewall 2004 (both closed-source, free softwares).
I used to visit a large number of web sites, but never had any virus issues. One thing I used to do as a security-conscious user, was enable file extension display, and avoid opening any e-mails with .scr,.pif, or any executable extension to the attachment.
I did have attempted network backdoor accesses (intrusions?) from other users on my ISP's network. However, these were blocked by my firewall.
-- Clinton Goveas -- http://www.clintongoveas.com