Computer Went Belly-UpS

[JohnP]

Jim - When you say "it has to be kept up to date" what do you mean?  If I buy a virus program for a year, doesn't it up-date itself?
I'm more than illiterate when it comes to computers, kinda like ya can't teach an old dog new tricks.

[FinsnFur]

Not necessarily. The update settings typically have to be adjusted to your preferences, and still even the few that default to automatic updates will have a setting in them to abort the update if your computer is too busy or low on resources. They do this so that you dont get disgruntled with their antivirus and turn it off or leave it disabled.
I leave mine machines connected to the internet 24/7, and I have them all set to update systems files and antivirus at 3:00 am

[possumal]

Jim, perhaps you could address an issue regarding automatic updates.  Like you, I have always had my automatic updates scheduled in the wee hours of the morning. However, my take is to not rely completely on automatic updates, especially where anti virus and anti malware programs are involved.  I manually update those programs at odd intervals, and my reasoning is that if you run a manual update and there are updates found and installed, that indicates that your pc is vulnerable or those updates would not have been available.  In summary, those updates you installed manually would have been installed automatically at a later time, so it appears to me it is a good idea to check things out from time to time as opposed to trusting automatic updates. What say you?

[FinsnFur]

I can see your point, but updating absolutely instantaneously is not only not necessary, it's not even an option. The antivirus software itself is not even going to allow itself to be connected to their server 24/7 so that updates are instantly intravenously added to your install. If left on "Automatic Updates", they'll still only check once in a while.
Plus as long as the software is kept up to date, there's never been an incident that I'm aware of where someones machine was compromised because they missed an update by 24 hours...well...unless they make a living surfing Turkish porn sites.