A Few Notes About Malware Protection

I do not use a whole lot of malware protection, and they are all free applications (but donating and promoting is allowed and appreciated).  See, a simple rule is “If you don’t go where bad things are, then bad things won’t get on your computer”.  This is not 100% true, but covers the majority of issues.  I keep the Windows Firewall active, and Windows Defender.  The only other live scanning program I use is Avast.  I will download and use either Ad-Aware or Spybot if I suspect and issue that Windows Defender or Avast are not fixing (aside from live scanning, both those applications offer scheduled and interactive scanning options).  This is of course on my Window machine, for Linux (Ubuntu) I do also have Avast, not scanning live, just ready if I suspect something; and on Karah’s Mac I haven’t yet had a need (she doesn’t “travel off the beaten path”, and I trust the router firewall).
I don’t even really feel the need to be constantly running security software, other than that I do use online banking and want to prevent people from being able to access that info (and to all you Mac users who want to say it is safer, it’s not for this type of thing, use Private Browsing).  Nowadays which web browser you are using is almost as important as what operating system you have.  I usually just use whichever browser comes with the system (IE for Windows, Safari for Mac, Firefox for most Linux), but I do prefer Opera (Chrome is good too).
It is true that Mac is safer than Windows, less people code malware for it.  Macintosh has fewer users, especially business users, thus they are targeted less.  Nothing against the engineers behind the OS, it is a good one, with fewer issues than a Windows OS normally has; I’m just saying they also get challenged less and have less to fear.  If your computing security has reached paranoia levels, switch to a solid Linux distro and live happily ever “What the heck do kernel, root, and sudo mean?”, just kidding, but you will have to learn a few new things if you switch operating systems.