In your case, it sounds like you have people using the system which fall into “I want to see this and will click anything it takes to get to it” category, so the extra layer of protection is probably worth it.

Not to mention, you can always fall back on the fact that you have AV installed. If you don’t run AV then you might be “perceived” (by some) as not protecting the system.

There is a reason there are 5,000 AV and clean-my-computer programs out there— because people have been made to believe these are absolutely essential.

“with one Anti-virus and one firewall and for six years no serious infections”
Note that despite having AV on your system, you still get infections. The problem is the buck stops with the user and if everyone is an Admin, no matter how “secure” your system is one inadvertent or ill-advised click and your security is completely compromised.

As for the 90 second boot time. I had AVG 8 on the system and took roughly 1 minute on every boot-up (I shut my computer down at night) for AVG to contact the update server, install the update, initialize, etc. During this time, my CPU hovered around 75-100% usage which made the system crawl.

As for this article being an excuse for people to blindly uninstall AV without any consideration. For people that fit in this category, I have some snake oil medicine I would like to sell them. Seriously though, this just proves my point that no matter what you do, you cannot protect people from themselves.

Because I do think there are situations where some can get by without an Antivirus. But only for those whose behavior doesn’t lead them to be infected. For example a computer that is dedicated to gaming or where the internet is only used to surf to certain sites, but as you yourself say, common sense, and I will add safe surfing habits that are learned with the help of common sense, is the biggest factor–so I’m a bit distressed to see it at the end of the list. I’m not sure there aren’t some “gotchas” with running as limited user, so think you are overemphasizing this. For one thing, if you have the right to Run as Administrator to install software, what is to prevent malware from running a script that does the same? Not sure if that’s possible, but even so, there are situations using XP where running restricted can cause problems. When there are multiple users, such as on my machine, one account running restricted slows things down as some programs that install globally and need Admin rights, throw up errors.

Four users on this system, all Administrators now, with one Anti-virus and one firewall and for six years no serious infections. I have seen a lot of people that overload their systems with security apps–I don’t have any anti-spyware/malware guards or monitors and think they aren’t needed if your surfing habits are good. I try to run lean and mean, so agree that a lot of security apps can be eliminated to improve performance. But I won’t sacrifice an AV lest Murphy’s law catches me with my pants down.

What AV are you using that takes 90 seconds to startup? I also have an old system with the same processor as yours, less than a Gig of RAM, and it takes me 40 seconds to get to the logon screen from a cold start and about 20 seconds to load autostart programs after login (but I have more than just an AV loading and could reduce this if I wanted). I use Antivir, which has a very light footprint.

Security is a matter of risk reduction. Not using an AV increases your risk at the expense of saving some time and not worth it in my opinion. Even if the times savings are significant as you’ve demonstrated, a good multitasker will find a good use for that time. People who get infected and thus allow it to spread to others usually (not always, usually) don’t have enough common sense to discern that your advice is not suited to them and will use it as an excuse–all they care about is increasing performance and saving time and continuing with their bad habit.