This was a constant battle I recall from back in the original days of "modern" PC's. It was a double edged sword. Either take your chances with no protection, or use some huge ram-sucking, clock cycle hogging suite of software, that regularly updated with an even more bloated set of definitions. Obviously, most played it safe and used whatever they could get their hands on, but was it really as bad as I remember?

On my older systems, I keep them offline, so it's largely unnecessary to worry about antivirus. All the important things are backed up, usually in more than one form, so they can be easily accessed on any PC in a pinch.

I bring this up because I'm amazed in using older PCs like my 100mhz PC340, how even though it's using a high cpu utilization, I can still play mp3s and do word processing or play some games fairly smoothly. Let's be honest, yes I know internet browsing is a whole different thing, but in the dial up era the modem was the lag point - especially for suckers like me whose phone line wouldn't do 56k.

How much of the upgrade cycle was driven by this ? How much lag did av really introduce, especially in the p1 era and before? Later systems seemed to handle it better overall, but even semi-modern PC's with avg sometimes seem to lag badly because of it. Thoughts?