Something I kinda have wanted to get off my chest for a while:

No, shitty anti-viruses (read: Norton, McAffee, etc.) aren't better than nothing. I roll without out an active antivirus most of the time (at least I did, and will again when my MBAM premium runs out) and visit rather shady sites regularly, yet I have not had an infection in years. Bloated security software does more harm to the computer by wasting system resources and blocking other removal tools; Windows Defender with MBAM free is more than sufficient for 99% of users, if even those. My Grandfather's computer was completely overloaded with rogues and a few rootkits with Norton running to the point my father just bought him a new one for Christmas. We then took the old one and nuked it from orbit because it was just so infected.

To keep clean:

Get a good adBlocker (I recommend uBlock Origin for Chrome/Firefox/Pale Moon), disable running scripts and plug-ins by default, and don't download something you didn't intend to. For piracy, don't run .exe files unless your going for software. For software keep it to fairly trusted torrent/download sites, preferably ones with a good community (since good communities will report and clean up bad downloads) and go for the best seeded torrents since people tend not to seed malware.

On the plus side, I finally got my father to come around to not shitting up every computer with Norton; I managed to convince him to use Windows Defender on my Grandfather's new computer and the old one we ended up giving to my step-mother's side of the family, which is a start.