Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Windows boxes as my primary work / personal machine for over 20 years and I've only gotten a handful of viruses or malware and in the times I got them, I was going to very questionable sites back in the day.

I disable Windows defender and all built in firewalls (my router has a firewall). I also don't run any anti-virus software. This is something I've done from the beginning.

But I do run uBlock Origin in any browser I use.

I also make sure to Win key + L (lock) my machine when I leave it unattended.

From time to time I check the startup tab in task manager to make sure nothing looks suspicious and occasionally look at things like CPU / memory usage to look for anything out of place.

So far it's been working out great. My current computer runs just as fast as it did 5 years ago when I built it and I haven't had to format a machine due to a virus in over a decade.

I find most things like Windows defender and A / V tools to be more destructive than most malicious software. Often times these tools will crush I/O performance and make things run slower 100% of the time in the off chance you get a virus. I'd rather have things run super fast all of the time and take my chances. If I get even a hint of my machine being compromised I would format anyways.

" I've only gotten a handful of viruses or malware "

This is a variation of the bad toupee fallacy. You won't notice viruses and malware, almost by definition.

If a virus or malware has no noticeable effect - does nothing that affects me - is it still a virus or malware?

So quietly exfiltrating your personal data is OK then?

If it has no noticeable effect - my life is completely identical - it's hard for me to see it as something negative. If something has absolutely zero effect on my life whatsoever - not even a single advert on my screen - calling it a virus or malware seems unwarranted.

I suppose if my personal data was somehow used to damage someone else, that would warrant calling it malware.

Your stolen personal data could be used to empty your bank account or to commit a crime in your name which could cause permanent damage to your reputation, even if you were exonerated.

That sounds like something I would notice, and is thus outside the scope of this discussion.

Most viruses back in the day just slammed you with a billion popups and added suspicious files to certain areas of your file system. You could easily see if you were infected or not.

Also, in the past, I've on occasion scanned my machine using malware bytes and other tools and they always came up clean.

Of course that doesn't mean I'm in the clear but if an A / V tool doesn't detect it, then what point is there to run that A / V tool? Truthfully, it's really really easy to write a malicious tool and not have it be detected by any type of software. That's why you should be careful with downloading and running unknown software (which I am very careful of).

I leave the firewall and Windows Defender etc on constantly, I haven't experienced any of the issues with speed/IO etc you seem to have.

How old is your machine? On a modern computer with a decent processor, a decent amount of RAM and an SSD you really shouldn't notice Windows Defender. Maybe you have more viruses than you think?

> How old is your machine? On a modern computer with a decent processor, a decent amount of RAM and an SSD you really shouldn't notice Windows Defender. Maybe you have more viruses than you think?

It's an i5 3.2ghz quad core with 16GB of RAM and an SSD. Windows defender cripples WSL performance. It's a known issue.

Right now most things open nearly instantly and I have no complaints with performance, even when doing very demanding tasks like running a few virtual machines while running test suites and simultaneously recording 1080p video while having 15 tmux sessions running in the background, etc..

> Windows defender cripples WSL performance. It's a known issue.

Hmph. I have a similar setup at home. I haven't noticed anything odd about WSL, but I just use it for development (editing and compiling), but not any heavy-duty processing.

My main set up is to run Docker for Windows, connect to it through WSL and volume mount code from a drive into Docker to do active development (Rails, Flask, Phoenix apps mostly).

While I never ran Windows defender personally, a bunch of my students (I run a Docker course) who had Windows defender enabled said volume performance was disappointing on Windows. After they disabled defender, things were really good. If you Google around there's a lot of people who mention that. Improvements are being made, but I still don't want a tool actively scanning files while I'm trying to use my machine.

Interesting, I use WSL as well, when I get a chance I'll turn it off and see if WSL speeds up!

I'm with you. The overhead of AV scanning is something you have to put up with 100% of the time for the off chance that you get infected with something, and they aren't very reliable detectors of malware anyway. It's much better to turn that crap off and use other, more effective, mitigation strategies.

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