I've been panicky and paranoid about the harddrive failing for many years now. I was highly suspicious of clicking noises being made by the computer when I transferred everything to a new case. (Fun fact; the clicking noises persist long after I shut off the computer, so it's just random shit creaking and clacking or the fans being chipped) But given that it has been at least two years now since that (and close to three since first getting both harddrives), I think that I am more likely to replace them before they start catastrophically failing.


This isn't something that has gotten worse over time, and there's no real risk of the system crashing, except until the point I got a new videocard which is subject to "Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" messages whenever IE runs high on memory, which is more likely to occur if I play around on the computer before letting it "warm up" (though even then it takes a lot to actually induce this, and extremely rare to cause the display driver to do this twice in a row, leading to a system crash)


As for Anti-Virus, I can't say for certain. I have a Norton Internet Security suite that came with my cable subscription, and it includes some other Norton system works that only appears whenever it wants me to clear out old shortcuts and useless registry things. The product automatically does background scanning and such when I go idle for several minutes, but I wouldn't put it past the program to do some things automatically at startup.