On the face if it you do not seem to be amongst those who value the protection offered by AV products and you give the impression that you do not consider yourself to have anything of value to protect, you can resinstall and use your keygens and free software, it costs you nothing.
I have plenty of important stuff -- from documents to the fact that I am shopping a lot online. FYI, only for e-books (mostly ePub) alone I have paid 600 EUR. (And yes, I have removed their DRM encryption. I don't give a shit on what the law says, I don't want to rely on ADE to allow me to copy them on my e-readers.)
OTOH, I do backup my data.
Also, I have used ALL the operating systems on planet Earth except for Mac OS X, and
I have NEVER been virused, not even once, since 1993! Never ever. And yes, I have been exposed to plenty of malware!(OK, I have also been using dozens of Linux distros, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc. But I still had a Windows somewhere. Except for some 6 months, always.)
FYI, when I have used a commercial AV solution (e.g. Panda, Kaspersky) or a commercial version of an AV, I've always PAID for it (or I have legally used a graciously offered 6-mo or 1-yr license; offered by *them*, not online). It's stupid to crack your security solution!
Yet, false positives are pissing me off. ALWAYS.I once had a collection of keygens I'VE NEVER USED, just to test how the major AV reacted to each of them (not only VisusTotal.com, but the actual AV experience). This is how I discovered that BitDefender wouldn't allow me to configure it to ASK me what to do, because BitDefender just wanted to delete (not quarantine, but delete) a specific keygen BEFORE telling me "hey, I deleted a malware"! (Maybe that one was used to crack their own AV? I dunno.)
It is my right to archive files and
I want a security solution to give me *competent* estimates, not wild guesses. I'd also prefer to have the choice of what to do -- default actions often suck.
(Off-topic: how many people would actually pay $59.95 for a text editor such as UltraEdit? The "correct" price would me more like $19.95 IMHO... OTOH, TextEdit can be used "as shareware", it's fully functional indefinitely, the registration only removes the splash screen AFAIK. And AptEdit Lite is 100% free.)