how do you guys stay safe downloading?

I run all software except for genuine products on a VM. Most modern PC's can handle at least one virtual machine running at a reasonable speed. Even though Virustotal scans or any AV scans for that matter say the file is clean, it may be infected. You never know. Using a VM is an easy solution to avoid getting fucked by malware. As for VMs, VirtualBox is free and I use it personally, I have 4 Windows VMs running simultaneously and it can handle it without any issues.