Are you being serious Darren?, the only programs that load up at boot time and run in the background are ZA, Avast 4 and Spyware Guard, the other programs are spyware checkers, my spare P2 laptop with 64 mb memory runs fine with that little lot running.
It may look a lot of AV/spyware programs but i have never had a virus/trojan/spyware/dialler etc since running those programs regurlarly.
I'm being deadly serious. And I've never had a virus/trojan/spyware/dialler etc since November 1992 when I got my first PC. Apart from the one that
I put on myself from an infected gfx driver file.
Every single day, I hear of people at work that "...... blah, blah, I've got this on my PC at home - what do I do?" The very first question I throw back at them is 'What crap are you running?'. Needless to say, they then spew out a long list of AV/pop-up/spyware crap that's been recommended by a friend of a friend of somebody who knows someone.
A good 90% of software like that is total turd. Fact. In the worst case scenario (like 172.com says) is the fact that they contradict and cripple each other in a way that makes the PC more bloody vunerable that without the software in the first place.
Most of the risks can be stopped by education - not software. It amazes me how novice users can think that after spending £30-£40 in an off-the-shelf product, that they can then continue to use internet the way they did previously when they had all the virus and spyware issues. It just doesn't work like that.
Just the other month, I had a staff member's PC here that was riddled with crap (mostly from satan's ringpiece - MSN) - so much so that it frequently crashed with a blue screen error. The 5-10 minutes so of 'life' that it had before crashing allowed me to see the contents of the programs. To this day - I doubt I've seen so many anti-everything programs installed onto one PC.
It got reformatted and in the process of that, I asked how the PC was used on a daily basis - in particular, on the internet. A little re-education, a basic setup of security and alls well some months after.
If I convince just
one person not to go down the knee-jerk route of 'I'll install this because geezer said it was good' - then I'd consider that a success.
D.