at the price of your email address with years of spam to follow 
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Hi Lily, start off with a free trial, with one of the well known companies, if you use online banking, check which service you bank recommends. I have used various throughout the years and have stuck with https://www.malwarebytes.com/malware/ for the last 5 years. Not a single problem since then. I also have windows 10
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Use Bitdefender. By far the best antivirus going. Easy to use and does not bombard you with tech nonsense. 8
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I have been using Windows 10 with Defender since it came out, with no problems. Yes techies will tell you to buy an AV because they want to sell you one. My son has worked as a computer tech for seven years, and he is happy with my current set up. The only other thing I run is a free anti malware prog. One of the best things is common sense! Donāt open suspicious email attachments etc. Hover mouse pointer over incoming email addresses to see if they look genuine. If in doubtā¦Delete
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The built-in security of Win 10 is really quite good.
SpyBot is excellent if you think youāve got something nasty on your PC.
Norton and McAffee are just outdated bloatware and utter scams.
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not unlike the millennium bug was then 
your mean John - how are you any way
I know, itās that William Brown streak Peter 
Weāre all good here thanks, things are hotting up covidwise in Marseilles but low incidence in the Var, so far, and most of the tourists ate gone. They gave a useful boost to the local economy.
I guess itās race now as to whether you make Salernes before I make Perth 
Hope all is well your end.
Ahhh, weāll never know 
I used many a two digit field in my day. I remember writing an interest calculation routine for āunnamedā bank. Given the floating point limitations of the hardware I couldnāt actually get the number to the accuracy I wanted. So, in a fit of socialism (I was young) I deducted a penny at the end of each calculation. Compounded over the lifetime of that system goodness knows how much I gave back 
AVG free is very good.
If you are using an Orange/Bouygues/whatever internet box/router it will have some protections built in.
Switching to Linux doesnāt provide any extra protection over and above what Windows provides and probably less, despite what some say. You still have to decide what anti-virus, anti-phising software you need. Linux is still for experts not for end-users.
I used AVG for a few years, but it was resource intensive. I switched to Bitdefender 5 years ago and I have never had any issues with it. On Windows itās only paid for I think, but worth it. You may be able to get a 30 day trial to try it out.
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The millennium bug didnāt drag down all the worldās computers and smart devices because tens of thousands of coders across the planet spent man centuries finding and patching out the issue.
Gāday John
Good to hear you are contemplating coming to Oz
We canāt leave the country unless we have a super good reason.
If you come you need to self-isolate for 2 x weeks at your own cost which is quite expensive
I was thing like march 2021 ā letās see how it goes
Cheers
Peter
I have been a PC security consultant for many years, Windows Defender with Windows 10 is perfectly fine. Make sure you keep up to date with WIN10 software this is automatic and donāt access sites from SPAM or suspicious emails.
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What Iād like to know Pete is, whatever happened to Windows 9?
Thereby hangs a taleā¦
I still have Windows 7 on an older computer which still works fine. I thought the consensus was that W7 couldnāt be upgraded to W10 but a local shop said he could do it quite easily.
The issue Peter is that, like every new release of an operating system with maybe the exception of Linux, the OS will use more resources and may run so slowly on the old hardware as to make it unusable. Unless there are specific features you need in Win10 Iād stick with Win7.
Yep, quite agree. Itās still a good computer and a perfect back up.
I like W7, fairly idiot proof which is important chez moi !
Switching to Linux doesnāt provide any extra protection over and above what Windows provides and probably less, despite what some say.
I would question that statement based purely on statistical distribution. The fact is that most attempts to take control of someoneās computer remotely involve installing an executable piece of code. Windows is still installed in a majority of computers today, ergo, statistically they make for an easier target for development, and the potential spread of malware (with the possible exception of Android smartphones). It is more difficult to exploit holes in the VBA/Office API on Linux as that API is simply not executable on that OS. So, if I want to craft a dodgy document that is likely to procure a successful result on a broad range of target usersā computers, then I would choose to do so on Windows purely from that statistical analysis. This is reflected in real life.
Of course, neither Linux nor macOS are immune from such attempts, but the vectors by which to take control of those OSes are different and generally require a different set of executions to be successful. For as long as software code contains weaknesses, there will always be the opportunity to exploit them. On Linux, you might probably never know youād been hacked, but it would be by default easier to find out, as the the tools, and information are available to let you do that. On macOS, by default, as Apple implements a policy of security through obfuscation, it is very much harder to know what is considered normal activity, from what is not, for the standard user, thereby making the user essentially reliant on Appleās goodwill. Unfortunately, macOS has been shown to be hackable in more ways than one, even with the Appleās current security model implementation.
My point in all this is that reducing the risk involves reducing the available attack surface. Most people do not want to live with the constraints that truly increased security requires, and therefore accept that compromises need to be made. The question then is one of how much compromise one is prepared to allow. Choosing a less widely distributed operating system, which in and of itself represents a fractured market with slightly different implementations for each flavour (distribution), reduces that attack surface even further.
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