WINDOWS XP: Countdown to April 8th

[anon(394005)]

An update once a month is not really staying up to speed with current threats. A rule of thumb is that after a week of no updates, an antivirus/antimalware program seriously loses effectiveness.

True for antivirus/anti-malware since they're behavior based (detect bad stuff based on how things behave on the local system). They need frequent updates (recommend at least daily) to know those bad behaviors and detect them. A blocking hosts file doesn't use behaviors, just a blacklist of known bad stuff (including entire domains) that are outright blocked, preventing whatever bad stuff that may reside on them from even reaching your system in the first place. Neither should be used alone, but combined provide a very strong line of defense. If something should get past one layer, there's another to try to stop it.