"Anything at all can happen to my XP and I DON'T CARE"

There I was, rumbling around a forum looking at a topic about wiping PCs then reinstalling.

Then I saw this and everything went scarlet shades of blood red, or something. What follows is bits of their post mixed in with my reply. Oh, so very annoyed. I think I might have to split my trousers and turn into a big, green ball of rage that goes around smashing things for a while.

"Our computers DON'T run anti-virus software at all because this is the way they are set up. Anything at all can happen to my XP and I DON'T CARE. Takes an hour of my day to reinstall, and IF I have to do it, I can do it while I'm making dinner for my kids. Easy as pie."

This is stunningly irresponsible and incredibly stupid for two reasons (and I'm going to assume you mean *all* security products when you say "anti-virus").

1) You're contributing to the general mass of infected machines out there that send spam, join botnets, DoS other machines / websites and who knows what else. Very quickly, your problem becomes everybody elses problem and eventually you'll start to feel the effect of this when everybodys net connection starts to suck when 99% of all background noise on the net is only there to slow you down.

When everybody has the same attitude as you, everybody will soon find its not even worth being connected to the net because it doesn't actually work very well.

2) A lot of ISPs are starting to wall off infected users for the above reason - to stop you screwing up the net for everyone else, and also to stop you wasting their bandwidth on thousands of spam mails every hour and the like. As a majority of todays infections are designed to get onto your PC unseen, and considering you "don't run any virus protection", how would you know there was something screwy going on until it was too late and had your account restricted? You won't be doing much "downloading, lol" then.

3) I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you might, sometimes, use the net to either purchase things with your credit / debit card, and also use username / password combos for various websites on the net.

If you're not running protection, in the time between getting infected and flattening your PC, how do you know your banking details and / or login details for various sites haven't been sent back to base already?

4) "And without running antivirus software you dont get your bandwith decreased"

....this is stupid. I can't say I've heard of many desktop security products continually connecting to the net and using up all your bandwidth. You download updates, and that's pretty much it. And wait, you're worried about some *tiny* drain on your system with regards a security product yet you don't care at ALL about being a botnet drone and having your entire PCs bandwidth blasted into the back of beyond?

Does. Not. Compute.

"your computer will operate so much easier because its not being policed by that software with everything you are doing."

Another poor excuse. There are tons of security products out there that don't bloat your PC. And again, you're worried about some slight impact on your computers performance via security tools, yet the inevitable 100% CPU usage, broken desktop and broken applications brought about by a hijack isn't a worry?

Oh right, flattening the system. I forgot.

Wait, here's a brainwave. Maybe if you actually installed some security protection on the PC you wouldn't have to wipe it every five minutes AND contribute to other peoples net usage by NOT having your infected PC sending them spam mails and hitting websites with denial of service attacks every five minutes?

Oh, and providing hackers out there with the encouragement and incentive to carry on with what they're doing on the basis that people like you leave their computers sitting wide open to attacks of course.