Thanks for your reply mate. Some sound advice there, which I followed. Basically the same thing Gareth from Tech. Support said to do. Common misconception that there are a ton of bugs just waiting until you connect to the internet to pounce into your machine and ruin your life, whereas in truth, it seems you have to initiate the attack yourself really, either by clicking through to some kind of dodgy link, fishy emails, dodgy download sites, etc, so I was fine just doing it how you said. Thank you for your assistance.
I think i'll just go with the Malwarebytes free edition, as you say,