It's not unreasonable to say that you can run Windows XP without antivirus, assuming that you are a competent computer user and keep Windows Update going. Once

It's not unreasonable to say that you can run Windows XP without antivirus, assuming that you are a competent computer user and keep Windows Update going. Once you have a virus, you will have to reformat to guarantee a clean system anyway; antivirus is simply a conceptually wrong solution to the problem (see also http://xkcd.com/463/ http://xkcd.com/463/). But, on the other hand, why not just use a better operating system? Linux, of course, but even Vista is going to have better lockdown of administrative privileges. One of the things I really couldn't stand about Windows was how every program had to have its own stupid little updater, with its own rules, taking up resources and system tray space. This is the worst part of automatic updates -- somehow most Windows developers are totally incompetent at writing them.