Security on Windows 8.1

In windows 8/8.1 Defender replaced Security Essentials. In most cases Defender is all you need, unless you want some of the extra features the competing products offer, like cloud backups, performance optimizations, real time threat reports, etc.

[RANT]Many of the reporting features and "optimizations" some of these products offer are mostly bogus, as Windows mostly takes care of performance by itself. Symantec, I'm looking at you! Instead of letting Windows do defragging and other tasks in the background you hijack the tasks and bug the user with warnings. And then you display "helpful" nonsense reports of how many temp files your product removed this time, or how your product just made the computer run so much faster while actually constantly using more CPU cycles than all other processes combined.. IMHO you should stay away from anything Symantec makes.[/RANT]

Windows 8.1 has what was previously known as Security Essentials built in. Yes it's true in the year of our lord twenty fourteen you don't need to install any AV on Windows for it to be secure.

Windows 8.1 Defender (included). A good addition for manual scans is Malwarebytes. But stay away from the other stuff.