Nah I will stick with MSE because the alternative for me is not to use an antivirus. If you ever want to know how to bring a 8-core i7 to its knees, install Norton. MSE is the only antivirus that is lightweight, stays out of your way and the least annoying of everything out there and not to mention its free with no ads. Sure, it doesn't have an heuristic scanning but it did once do a good job of detecting a malware that both Avast and Norton missed, which is good enough trust for me. The best feature is that it doesn't have a girl screaming "Avast, Your database have been updated." or "Your license is about to expire in 90days unless you pay $$$" every 4 hours.
Don't download anything sketchy, keep an updated version of your browser, don't run yourself as root and your should be fine for 99.9% infections out there. For the rest just keep MSE around.
You forgot the top two other pieces of advice - Make sure you have a decent adaptive firewall, and run anything even slightly worrisome in a virtual machine, never on your main operating system.
You are right, those too. I would also recommend Sandboxie[1], not sure on its effectiveness but the convenience to just right click and run apps in its own sandbox is huge. Does anyone know an open source alternative to it?
Also on Windows, consider looking at Software Restriction Policies. For my host partition, I have things configured to deny execute for anything not in Windows (and excluding some temp/cache dirs). So if I step away for a minute and someone tries to download and run an exe, Windows should prevent it. Would also prevent me from drunkenly saving cute.jpg.exe to my desktop and running it.
Don't download anything sketchy, keep an updated version of your browser, don't run yourself as root and your should be fine for 99.9% infections out there. For the rest just keep MSE around.