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Had I known I'd be referencing multiple antivirus products in this post at the time of writing it, I'd probably would have given a better title then a degrading pseudonym for AVG, perhaps AV-sell-your-personal-data-to-third-parties-G free edition, beside the point, it will be the last antivirus product that I'll use.

You might laugh, but I actually bought my first computer from Harvey Norman, mind you I was 13 at the time and didn't know any better, before that I was running *some IBM Pentium 3* that didn't have internet access, so viruses weren't really a concern at the time, but this new machine *a Windows XP OEM Compaq* came with a free copy of Norton Antivirus 2006, so I just used that for a year. - eventually the trial\free year\whatever, expired, almost immediately I got hit with a virus, or perhaps that was just the software trying to dark patten me, either way I didn't see a reason to renew the license since the computer was already infected, it turns out once the trial has been activated, it is impossible to uninstall Norton Antivirus without issue. - So, I spoke to an independent computer repair guy, and this was where I learned to reinstall Windows on this computer, following the philosophy of "teach a man to fish".

Before you say that it should be as easy as sticking the Windows CD in the drive, this computer came with a partition recovery drive, which required some fucky key combination at boot to access, which was the style at the time...

Paul was his name, and he was also the guy who introduced me to Linux (all the way back in 2006) - kids in the school yard loved to talk shit about Linux back then (can't run doom 3 etc.), staying on topic, when I finally got that PC reset, he handed me a copy of APC which had a free license of Kaspersky for a year, - it also had a batch script file on it as part of the auto run process which introduced me to scripting, which introduced me to programming ha-ha, I was that bright spark in the IT class, super leet hack0rs etc.

From there, I went through a few antivirus products over the years (all trash), Avast, McAfee, Trend Micro (enterprise), Sophos (enterprise) and Malwarebytes which always felt like a cleaner after the fact, into the Windows 7 era of desktops I think I finally settled on AVG Antivirus Free for a number of years, I also got smart about handling backups.

Which leads me up until today, AVG Antivirus Free now feels like a relic from the Windows XP days, it's not like we fucking need antivirus anymore anyway, its only to serve as a reminder: "Hey! you have a computer virus, time to format your machine and reinstall windows anyway."

A change in mentality means that I always have like 5 copies of everything backed-up to external hard drives, on data CDs\DVDs and cloud storage. - It's become a lot easier to just nuke the machine and start again lol.

Not to mention machines that are purely based as VM's with snapshots taken each time the thing starts. (I am still investigating the possibility of a Linux KVM passthrough and putting Windows in a sandbox)

The best defence that I've found against computer viruses is to just not be a fuckwit and install random shit from the internet. - although even in my case that can be easier said than done.

Moving forward I'll probably just default back to Microsoft Security Essentials or get dank MLG antivirus instead...