Here is the thing, you have to choose:
-> Aggressive, resource hungry anti-virus (reduce system performance), for the best protection, and live in a world of false positives.
-> Light weight anti-virus, feels like you have nothing running, but doesn't give you the best protection.
You can't have both. You can try to be close, but there is no solution.
The BEST solution, is safe web surfing practices. Virus and malware don't magically appear... well they can, but its actually insanely rare.
What are safe web surfing practices,m and good practices in general?
-> Know what you are download... and I mean, KNOW what you download.
-> Know WHERE you download. Example: You want to download Firefox, be sure to get it from Mozilla official web site, not some other site.
-> Know the attachment of e-mail, before opening them. It's from who? Do you know this person? What type of file is it? Is your email provider marked it as a potentially harmful file?
-> If you open an image file, or video file, or whatnot, and Windows tells you that this file wants elevated privileges to access system files (User Account Control dialog box), you know that something is wrong. Why would such file needs such level. It should ring bells telling you that there is a virus or malware trying to affect your system. If you are the type of person going "yea yea, whatever, next next next, continue, OK, OK", on everything you see, and you don't read things... well too bad for you.
And anti-virus, even an aggressive one, will help you so much.
Keep also in mind that an anti-virus software is about PREVENTION, not fixing. If you are effected, the Anti-virus can remove the virus or malware from your system. BUT any modification it has done to the system files, are permanent. The real fix for when you have an infection is a full wipe, and re-install of Windows. Opened security holes will remain open after the removal of the virus and malware.
A new type of attacks
Virus and malware makers, are seeing a reduction in benefits from making them. Not only they are now very hard to make. They don't bring much money in. or any value (make your computer part of an attack group which will be executed at some point in time, or such). Bit-coin crunching is valuable, but usually, the system infected, are not powerful enough, to handle the task, so it takes too much time to process.
A new area of malware, is ransom-ware. Programs that can't be stop as they work and act like a normal program on your system, but what it does is that it takes all your personal files, and encrypts them with a generated encryption key, using a sophisticated open source encryption system which would take years on end to decrypt with the fastest computer money can buy, and ask you to send them money in some fashion, for the program to decrypt the files (hopefully). The program is also on a timer base, where it give you a certain amount of minutes or hour or so, to decide if you want to make the transaction, else, it will delete the generated key. This is to prevent (well make it hard) for you to start decoding the process memory space and discover the generated key for yourself. Some of these programs look at the country defined in your sytsem configuration, and displays a picture of that your area upper police force, like the FBI, or RCMP.
Malwarebytes, or your favorite anti-virus won't help you against them.
Frequent backups, and know what goes in and out of your system, is key to avoid them.
Even Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president, says that Anti-virus are essentially dead:
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...antec-declares-av-dead-and-doomed-to-failure/
