Requesting Advice - Antivirus with X2a?

IMO, the most important aspect of internet security is to sit behind a firewall, which is typically a NAT firewall living in your modem/router.  In addition, Windows has its own built-in firewall.  These protect against malicious inbound connections, port scanning attacks etc.
 
Due to this inbound protection, the only way malicious software can get a foothold on your computer is via an outbound connection you make (unless you do something really crazy like run a nasty executable).
 
So as long as you're careful enough to not visit dodgy websites, open obviously su****ious emails etc. (and especially not clicking any links in such), all should be well.  In addition, I would suggest not to open any ports though your firewall (i.e. don't provide external services) unless you know what you're doing.
 
I personally just use the built-in AV software that comes with Windows 7, ' Windows Defender' I think it's called, and it's never caused any performance issues for me.  A reasonable policy would be to always make sure your AV software is active if you're accessing the internet, but otherwise you could disable it if you find that it affects performance of the DAW software.  A regular scan of the file system's not a bad idea either, schedule it for when you're not using the computer.
 
[edit, why the hell is 's u s p i c i o u s' dumped upon by the forum's word filter? :-(
edit 2: I think I know why now, that really is quite far beyond stupid]

I have MS security essentials on the music computer for w7.  And use the windows defender (default) for w8.
 
I do use the music computer to surf for music stuff.  Especially this forum when needed. But most web action takes place on other computers.  I do not use the music computer for email.
 
I use a NAT router, and the windows firewall is enabled.
 
Never had an infection on the music computer, in 13 years+.
 
In all, in 29 years of computing I prolly have had about 8 ****ty infections.   Mainly this has happened when accidentally clicking the wrong spot just as the requester for installation was displayed. And when mistyping a website address.
 
The first infection was about 12 years ago that came in with a friend's infected email message. Norton issued an update about 20 minutes later.
 
Only have had 2 infections that required extreme actions: using restore points.  Most all others were eradicated using Spybot, super anti spyware, mal ware bytes, and Kaspersky scanners.
 
 

+1 for Microsoft Security Essentials or for Win8, Windows Defender. It doesn't interfere with anything while I'm on the DAW (on my older machine, it does its updates around 4am when I'm in bed) and does everything in the background.
 
Malware Bytes is also an excellent free program to have. 

Another thing I'll say is if I cannot download a program directly from the manufacturers website I will use CNET.com for the download. They also have a ton of useful info and reviews on these programs. Another couple good sites for computer related info and security are tomshardware, bleeping computer and the HiJackThis forums. The HijackThisForums will actually allow you to submit the report HJT creates and the guys there will analyze it and tell you what to keep and what to remove because it lists EVERYTHING running on your system. That makes it very difficult to interpret for the average computer user. I have never submitted a report though but have identified unnecessary process by googling the process with the term HiJackThis added. This is not limited to viruses either. You can have little tidbits from old programs or if your system came preloaded with bloatware you can get rid of that stuff. Even a fresh install of Windows will have unneeded gack like Internet Explorer redirects and other nonsense. It's kind of interesting in a really dull geeky way.
 
;-)
 
Edit: I should probably mention that if you have MSE, a browser with Adblock and NoScript installed and set up and make sure you have a good system image and some restore points and only do minimal surfing on trusted sites then 99.9999999999999% of the time you won't need to worry about any of that other stuff. It's more for really heavy internet users or repairing machines where the user wasn't taking proper security precautions.

+1 to norton. I think it gained a reputation as a resource hog, but that is not deserved now

It works well here. If I have clients in, then I turn it off. It's not caused any problems before, but I do it just in case.

Can't knock MS Security Essentials. I use it for the casual PC's here at home.
 
As for back-up I, use Retrospect - besides the workstation it's running on, it comes with 5 additional remote client licenses too. It's backing up four desktops and a laptop. It's also cross-platform, so if you have Linux or Mac boxes, you can back those up too.
 

Here's the thing, and I'm not saying Norton or the other AVs have not improved as far as efficiency because I'm sure they have, but what are these conclusions being based on? I'm genuinely curious so don't take it the wrong way. Are you monitoring the performance in comparison to MSE? Tech articles and shootouts on the subject? Or is it because you don't notice as many problems? I say this because the difference may lie in the fact that computers and internet connections are much faster than they used to be. For example on my old underpowered laptops I tried a few different AVs like AVG, Norton (free version) and Spyware doctor before learning about Avast. AVG and the others made the systems almost useless (this was however about 5 years ago). They didn't just freeze up during the definition updates they were just horribly slow in general. Once I installed Avast everything was much snappier and the only time I really had any lags was if I was trying to do something like load a bulky webpage or play a video and the definition updates started loading as well so I'd just wait for a few minutes and things would go back to normal. Once I bought my new laptop those lags completely disappeared and I don't even notice Avast doing anything unless it happens to snag a bad page or something is trying to screw around with my system (which rarely happens because of ABP and NoScript and the fact I don't scrape the underbelly of the internet). I haven't tested the other AVs on this system aside from the "free" MaCafee (sp?) that came with it (which BTW DID make the system slower) so I do not know what, if any, kind of drains they'd cause so seriously I am just asking out of curiosity.
 
MSE has for the most part consistently beat out the rest of the pack as far as resource issues and ranked very high for virus prevention (although they've slipped a bit in those rankings but last I checked it was only some of the more expensive paid AVs  topping them like Kapersky).
 
Basically if it works for you guys that's great but you may have more powerful systems than others and/or not be doing stuff that is as resource intensive as other folks. The true measure of these types of things are benchmark tests. I'll admit I have not viewed what the various reviewers/testers have come up with in the past year or so and some of those can be skewed due to the testers not wanting to PO their advertisers. All I know is last time I checked MSE was right at the top of the lists, is free, was recommended by Cake tech support, does not need to be turned off or have any settings changed and seems to work on my system. I did have an odd thing happening a little while ago that I thought might be a virus but after a ton of scans with the programs I mentioned earlier I found nothing except some false positives. I think it may have been some kind of BIOS warning but it has disappeared now so IDK.
 
Again not saying I'm right or you guys are wrong. I just think it's important stuff to consider because virus protection, especially on a DAW, is a pretty serious topic and deserves appropriate attention to not only avoid viruses and malware but to make sure any problems with Sonar or other programs aren't because the AV is doing something funky. And that funkiness doesn't even necessarily need to be resource related. It might look at legit programs and cause weirdness especially considering many of the things we use are pretty darned obscure. That's exactly how I got my false positives when running my scans a few weeks ago.
 
Food for thought. Hope you've all been well. Cheers.

Thank you all for your helpful feedback; this forum is fantastic. 
 
Lots to think about here, but I'm encouraged by the reports of Microsoft's Windows Defender and Security Essentials in Win7.  I suppose I've been using Windows Defender without really being aware; I'll check the next time I boot up, but if it runs by default I'm probably running it.  I'm also NATed behind a firewall, and I don't have any oddball ports open on the router.  I don't run MS Office or anything like that, it's essentially all audio/video applications on this machine.  I'll occasionally read/send email via a webmail interface, but I don't open any link I don't trust.  Hopefully, if I browse responsibly I should continue to be OK...
 
@sharke, thanks for the tip about the AV folder exception list for the plugin folders; I can always use another 60 seconds, seriously.
 
@SuperG, backup, which I'm not currently doing (I know, I know...), is my next adminstrative chore for the DAW.  I'll be sure to check out Retrospect, thanks.

Quite a good Q&A page explaining Windows Defender and MS Security Essentials on Win 7 and 8:
 
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/mse-protect_start/windows-defender-and-microsoft-security-essentials/5309cb8d-02e1-40e8-974f-0dcedb9ab9fd
 
In light of this I think I'll check that I have SE on my DAW machine :-)

Caveat: AntiVirus software can affect the performance of Sonar. If the A/V software is running any kind of scan on your actively working hard-drive, Sonar will certainly, and profoundly be affected, performance-wise. I highly recommend setting scans to run at a time when Sonar isn't in use. The reason is that two software applications are competing for I/O, and your system must thread these by interleaving the I/O throughput. A/V will run as fast as your system will let it, although Sonar, may only need a fairly consistent I/O throughput. Sonar may not affect the A/V scan times, but the A/V scans can certainly affect the I/O available for Sonar.