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Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

It's unnecessary for users smart enough not to get viruses. Pretty necessary for users that aren't.

It's not rocket science. My mother is pretty tech illiterate but she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop. She literally just checks her mail, streams netflix and visits a handful of news websites. Lots of users are like this. They can get by fine just with an adblocker and an occasional scan to be sure. Scanning the disk constantly is just ridiculous.

> [...] she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop.

How would you (or she!) know that?

I do a basic service when I visit, including a malware scan.

anecdote to the contrary:

>visits a handful of news websites

That's exactly how I got my only zero day virus in 20+ years of tech career. News sites have sources. Some news are rumors. It was very long ago and i pressed source link to 'semi accurate' tech news source in a news about CPUs.

Your best bet is to replace hdd with ssd or replace laptop and turn everything to 'recommended' or even 'security recommended'. Yes 8ms delays on some file opens will be there but people can live with that.

HN readers can delete Windows antivirus and reduce global warming. It's your civic duty.

I would bet good money that people using an xtreme tuning OS like Atlas, are more likely to get their games from the pirate bay and their hacks from honest-bobs-totally-not-virii.com

For me, Atlas was just a way of installing my gaming windows install a little faster, because I didn't have to spend hours removing or disabling all the shitware, spyware etc. I was gonna do that anyway. I think it's just as likely that people using Atlas are just Linux/Mac daily drivers who consequently have a much lower tolerance for Windows' builtin malware, and so take efforts to make the little time they spend in Windows more bearable.

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