I would say Avast premium will be fine.
Thinking about patches, most of the security ones are for specific vulnerabilities, such as remote etc, and often would require a "hacker," to have pyhsical access to your PC.
Not always the case of course, but another thing is that these "security patches," have often been know about (by MS) for months before they bother to do anything about it.
I always keep my Win 10 pro updated, but honestly when reading the notes on MS site, most of them make no difference to me. I have remote, plus port 3890 blocked anyhow. Of course behind a hardware router based firewall.
My security has consisted of this for the past few years: (I won't detail GPO and/or reg edit hacks - others here are better informed by far than me about that.)
1. Malwarebytes premium realtime protection. Malwarewarebytes browser guard pro/full always on in Chrome. (The paid and far better seperate browser guard ext. blocks heaps of tracking cookies and ads, plus the occaisional malware - free can be installed from Chrome store, but auto updated to full if using Malwarebytes premium. (I started using MBAM over 15 years ago when a licence was for life - they have to honour that so no annual fee!! lucky me. Includes everything.)
2. I also keep windows defender on some of the time (MBAM is designed to work that way - a similar solution would be Emsisoft paid.). However I switch off smartscreen, don't use edge, and block the store via Group policy) Private account too.
So, I have never had a serious Malware issue with this setup.
I wonder if defender will be updated, file definitions I mean, anyone know? I assume yes for definitions, but not really sure?
Regardless it doesn't seem to do much, and I often switch the whole thing off by ticking a box in MBAM to register itself in the windows security center. Then security center switches it's self off and says something like,
you are using another security product for realtime protection, would you like to keep defender up to date for periodic scans only?
Those are NOT the exact words!
3. Finally using a third party local firewall, or blocking sfuff with the convoluted Windows firewall (especially Out traffic) selectively gives another layer of defence after the router firewall. I hate the Win firewall, and it took me ages to figure out properly what and how to block normally open stuff. I'll probably change to a third party one as every month patch Tue, some Windows firewall settings are reset, grrrrrr!!!
TBH it's not worth it.
Any recommedations for a good free, or cheapish paid standalone firewall solution? I think I need one. Totally peeved with the built in windows 10 firewall.!
So I'll wrap it up. A lot of what I wrote will be already known to members, but we get visitors too, so I wrote it such fashion. (There are more things that can be done via group policy, reg hacks etc, but there are folks here who know far better than me about that.)
In a word, I have no concerns about the end of Win 10 maintenance.
P.S. As you may have noted, I love text formatting options here, ha ha!!
