No not paying. My antivirus is sufficient. I also have a few Windows 7 PCs with no problems.
Maybe with a deep packet inspection firewall ..
I would consider running it in a virtual machine with latest bios and drivers.
The scary thing is when visiting a web page compromises the computer.
Turn off lots of networking features ...
Your antivirus can actually be used against you sometimes. there can be security problems in that itself.
It would be cool if they borrowed from rust and D and put more protections in.
I would hope that microsoft would already have a special compiler and analyst tools to look for problems, but there are device drivers that can be exploited too... and then probably hardware that has difficult to protect from conditions. like a hardware video decoder could be given a packet that borks it. Inspecting everything can be computationally intense.
I expect you to be ok if you don't go to pirate video and pr0n sites.... but one missclick and you can be exploited.
So maybe an on machine firewall can block some sites. Theoretically major sites will stop malicious videos from getting to you, but they post harmful brain rotting content, so can we actually trust them?