Your Antivirus ? How Long ?

I did did the same thing, no Firewall and not even a AV.

After that:

Norton: 4 years
Nod32 : 3 years
And now:KIS 6.0

 

AVG (free)... 1 year... untill i got infected
NOD32... 1 day... (to try to get rid of infections)
KAV5... 1 week... (to try to get rid of infections.... SUCCESS!... but resource hog, so went back to NOD32)
NOD32... 9 months... (untill KAV6 came out)
KAV6/KIS6... nearly a year... (had since KAV6 came out, then upgraded to KIS6 2 months after)... working great, not going to change it

 

I don't use a resident AV but do keep several for manual scanning. I've had F-Prot for DOS on this box since mid-2003, a command line scanner. Been using a free version of AntiVir since late 2003 as a manual scanner. I used to have the free version of AVG as a 3rd manual scanner for a couple years but dropped it at version 7. Too bloated. Recently I've added the AVZ Antiviral toolkit, a definite keeper.
Rick

 

Beginning around 2003 i had Norton that came with the PC & Win98SE.
It did little or nothing of catching problems so changed to Avast4 i think it was at the time. That was a pretty efficient antivirus that i settled on for nearly a year but then i experimented with Fprot for DOS a little while then went back to Avast which never was uninstalled anyway, just stored in a coma awhile

While still on a 98SE system i found and subsequently trialed Anti-Vir and liked it a great deal but eventually returned to Avast yet again. Just couldn't part from it due to most likely to my active involvement in their forums and also the excitement of what it proved for me & accomplished compared to others.

Along then came XP Pro and that's when i had some real hard decisions to make on choosing AV's. I kept having ongoing and sometimes disturbing issues with Avast/Anti-Vir/BitDefender etc. either due to my lack of fine tuning or it conflicting with other security programs i depended on.

When HIPS finally emerged only recently i completely abandoned any AV save only on-line scanners and i'm happy to report was never infected by anything either. But given the clever nature of virus & malware creators i thought it in the best interest to combine a dependable AV along with my HIPS in order to turn up the shielding capabilitie on any possible compromise of those monitoring systems.
Tried Avast yet again and it's ok by me but i found BitDefender even more to my liking; but it stalls on a scan and thats unacceptable. I read everyplace where NOD32 is top notch but also find a majority of Kaspersky loyals who would bet the farm on their choice so i selected KIS6 Suite even though with COMODO didn't think the firewall would be needed. It refused to install with COMODO so dropped it, installed the Suite and then installed Kerio 2.15 for safe measure and now i think i hit paydirt with this combo.

At least for now it serves very well, KIS6 destroyed every LeakTest i throwed at it including the Ghost one that even the HIPS fail at.

I'm new to this one but i am definitely not parting company with it after the astonishing results i seen that it performs and is immensely stable with the ton of other security apps i run with it. That's a major plus in and of itself.