A current way to defeat virii and malware

Currently Kaspersky Antivirus and Combofix work well.  Of course, Kaspersky is a paid software and Combofix is free.

Also there is a program called Sandboxie that allows you to run your web browsers in their own compartments of memory and hard disk space, keeping potential risks away from the main operating system.  This solution, while not perfect, works pretty good and allows you to download files and get prompted as to whether or not to allow them to go to the main operating system's download folders.  It also allows you to watch streamed video from sites such as youtube.

The other solution would be to set up a virtual machine.  This is a bit more cumbersome and most users will forget to click over to a VM when they want to browse the internet.  Sandboxie is more convenient in that aspect.

I have found web browsing overall to be a little bit impeded by the installation of Sandboxie so far but it is not real bad.  It can be annoying at times.  It might be that the drivers on this laptop are too old though so there is more work to be done.  Currently I run it on two laptops and have not set up on a desktop yet.