Now from a corporate network perspective not all of my ideas are sound and productive goals to go about things – but from a small home network we can get away with a bit more.

Neither I nor my wife has ever really run full-time anti-virus scanning on our home PCs. We scan them every once in a great while when we think something is amiss – but 9 times out of 10 it’s usually spyware. (Disclaimer – my work machine runs Norton Anti-Virus corporate edition which I recommend if you are going to buy an AV solution)

The reasons that we never really ran it are a few, but mostly that we follow good internet practices.

1. We do not randomly open file attachments – usually we know when someone we trust is sending us something and it wouldn’t have the title “check this out” our contacts will usually put something more personal in the text that wasn’t as generic as 99% of email viruses.

2. We download from trusted sources

3. Our computers ever never been directly exposed to the internet so no incoming worms here.

But it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Recently because she thought she had a mystery virus my wife has fought with Clam AV to find it on her PC. Nothing shows up but it takes a lot of CPU and seems to take 12-13 hours to scan her machine. Because of the CPU hit her machine is mostly useless to her for this time frame.

How can we correct that?

We are going to design a centralized AV scanning box