I only have found two viruses on my PCs in over 10 years of extensive browsing, thank God, though i usually use the http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm. I also rather regularly regularly check what is running, and using cpu cycles, and investigate things i do not recognize, and WinPartrol alerts me to new startup items, and shows what is set to do so.
it’s been, about 7 months without a serious infection - ie, something that would affect the operation of a laptop. I’m sold on 7.