Privacy has been gone out the window a long time. Not sure what your protecting by keeping away from a Realtime AV that isn't already known about you.
Key sentence being "used to be effective". Any offline antivirus is not effective at all. The cloud plays a huge part in preventing malware infection. The old ways of doing definitions does very little to protect you anymore. However it is indeed better than nothing.
Like MS and other AVs reporting user's files to authorities, no other software does that, except cloud now.
www.ibtimes.co.uk
I have not used AV since XP, default deny still beats any AV with a random number of detections.
devblogs.microsoft.com
My 75 years old mom does not even know, what is AV and I know that her PC is 100% safe without AV. DNS alone mitigates 99% threats, as for the rest, you can simply disable malware in Windows by disabling WSH, PowerShell and such.
