IMHO it's easy enough to know when things aren't running right. And keeping your system right by your own practices is as sound a piece of advice as Rik's perfect contribution.

I'd put myself in that category and yet, without McAfee, Ad-aware and Anti-Malware I'd be up sh*t creek, There are many so-called safe sites who have unbeknown malware embedded somewhere in their servers. Cookies are a real risk but you can't stop them and still do reasonable stuff.

I rely totally on McAfee and Ad-Aware to block trojans and unexpected registry entries;the anti-malwarebytes (which I pay for) to scan every time I "feel" something's not right.

Sorry mate, but this is my turn to disagree with you (no offence). While I fully agree with having a good AV/Anti-malware (preferably both bundled in one) to watch over things, McAfee has long been shown to be a very poor solution. There are actually 3 free alternatives (don't even think of AVG) that ALL top McAfee stats-wise... Avire, Avast and Comodo.

If you are looking for a paid-for AV, G Data is consistently out-performing just about EVERYONE (only recently discovered this one, but has my interest well and truly peaked). McAfee was once upon a time a decent AV, but has well and truly fallen behind the times.

I am sorry but I have to disagree with a small part of the above statement.
Reason.
With all in one software, if one part of it gets attacked you can loose the whole lot (Norton for example).
If you have everything separate, if one goes down, the rest usually are unaffected.

@kaninelupus

We can debate until the moon turns to cheese which AV program is best. I am totally satisfied with McAfee (and with Kaspersky on the Quaddie).

On the other hand, if you know something about McAfee that I should know - e.g. specific weaknesses, then do please share the info.

Have a look at the two links below to see just how poorly McAfee compares to others:
http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/09_02
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-B...ns-80796.shtml

Also, my wife's notebook came with McAfee bundled, minus an uninstaller (which cost me a couple of hours in tracking down an unistall utility for it). Now my wife is not the most tech-savy person on the face of the earth, and had several infections within the first week, all of which got past McAfee. So sorry, but has lost me completely.

I understand the logic behind that, but my experience with both Symantec's corporate AV suite's and Comodo doesn't hold to that. Have been times where say the firewall has failed, but the rest of the processes have held up. And usually where a process halts, has been a simple matter of closing the mother process/utility down and restarting. Also, using multiple apps tends to chew up system resources, as there is little core-file sharing or communication btwn them... the weight placed on the OS causes more instability issues than the risk of a one-part crashing all concern.

There's a website www.fileinspect.com where you can research Windows processes.