Reasonable, basic security for a NORMAL PC?

This may be too general, or too simple, but I figured I'd ask the experts in here...

Looking for something that’ll do a good job for security on a couple NORMAL PCs. These aren’t systems holding the codes for Fort Knox, or the financials for a small country. They’re ordinary, normal PCs with some emails, pictures, and passwords (and such) in a password manager. Wife does email, Facebook and browsing. I do the same, and a little image editing.

Backups happen nightly on both, and go offsite regularly.

We’ve had Bitdefender Total Security for the last year. It seems like overkill, and a lot of the stuff wasn’t even usable. Over the year, as “features” turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, we turned them off. And no, I don’t even remember what most of them were. I know we tried Safepay and it didn’t work at all.

Vulnerability scans have always complained about the same things – browsers aren’t totally secure. Once in a great while there’s an update that hasn’t been put on yet. Other than that, it never finds much.

Does their anti-tracker do anything magical? ‘Cause so far, near as I can tell its never found much of interest. And the browsers have add-ons to minimize spam and such. Same for email - we don't get a lot of spam.

Having it tell me seven times that I’m using the microphone when in a Zoom meeting gets old fast.

Mostly it just sits around with a bunch of processes running on the system and periodically squawks about “Suspicious connection blocked”. But isn’t that something Windows Defender will do or is Bitdefender actually doing something REALLY special?

And is there some really GOOD reason to need a VPN when the most elaborate thing we do is occasionally put a picture on Facebook? Or, again, am I missing something obvious?

It could be ignorance, and we actually need more than we think, but it doesn’t seem like it…

Bitdefender goes away soon. Will Windows Defender and the Windows firewall do everything a plain, ordinary user that’s NOT trying to manage the family fortune on their PC needs? Or do we need something a little more robust?

If so, what would be the simplest, easiest to administer, least likely to freak out my wife by throwing up scary warnings, tool to do what’s actually NEEDED?

Cool... Yes, we both run Malwarebytes regularly, and CCleaner periodically.

I generally have it clean up all the browser junk – though, all my browsers are set to erase EVERYTHING every time I close them.

I let it go through all the system options. Let it run through the applications.

Clean up the registry. Occasionally let it run through and spot duplicates.

Normal CCleaner stuff… Is there something specific I should be doing?

GracieAllen said:

Clean up the registry.

Hello @GracieAllen

This is where the line should have been drawn...

Even for the advanced Windows® users, and except under the direction of a qualified malware removal professional, and regardless of the cleaner's reputation, Windows registry cleaning should always be avoided:

1. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...1-7b0fd54e8b3a
2. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threats/registry-cleaner/
3. Registry Cleaners? - All Other Applications

Instead, practice safe hex and maintain an excellent backup strategy.

HTH