One reason I never use AV is that it slows down the computer to a point where it’s nearly unusable. On the old single core processors, I would guess that the AV took like 50% of the processing power of the chip (if it ran at 2ghz, the computer now runs at 1 ghz because of the AV.) On my current work laptops, the AV causes them to freeze for about 5 minutes during bootup.
Therefore, I was wondering: with computers breaking 3ghz and overclocking at 4-6 ghz, at what point would the computer be buff enough to run AV without any noticeable delays?
Or, is there some sort of bottleneck that is causing the computer to slow down so much? My guess would be that harddrive speeds haven’t kept up with CPU speeds, so would solid state drives be the solution?
Current system:
Core i5-750 CPU 2.66Ghz
8 GB RAM
Windows 7-64bit running Areo
Microsoft Security Essentials
Malwarebytes
SUPERAntispyware
With Firefox open, I’m using 1.5 GB RAM 1-3% CPU use with system idling.
I can run a scan with all three at once without slowing the system.
My old system was almost 7 years old(single core Pentium/512 MB RAM/ XP) and running a scan with !avast would slow it to the point of being useless and took several hours to complete. Same with any of the various anti-virus/spyware programs.
How many cores is your CPU? I’m not really up on all the ins and outs of computer performance but it might be if you only have a dual core, it’s using one or both and that’s the bottleneck.
What AV program are you using? The times I’ve had trouble with slow bootup, the AV was causing conflicts with other loading programs. I changed a setting in the AV to make it load after everything else, which fixed the problem. You can use free startup programs which do the same thing, like Start-Q. (I’m using Avast, which doesn’t seem to be slowing things down much, but I never considered it before. With all its components, it’s a total of 59,000k of memory.)
If you have a machine which takes 5 minutes to boot up, AV is not your problem. Something else is seriously wrong.
I have a 10 year old desktop. (no kidding. it’ll be 11 this fall.) With a Genuine Pentium 4 CPU woot!! It runs WinXp SP3. And Msft Security Essentials. From a cold start I have a login prompt in ~45 seconds.
I ran without any AV for a couple weeks. No discernable difference in bootup or run speed.
I’m not sure what your problem is, but it ain’t AV.
I had horrible issues with AVG until I disabled the link checker. After that, my computer speeds along just fine. Which makes sense as AVG was literally checking every link on every page before it let me see it.
So try disabling the link checker (and also disable the email checker if problem continues)
There’s something seriously wrong if your AV software does that.
Wait a mo. You’re using Norton / Symantec, aren’t you? Ditch it with extreme prejudice.
I’ve used Avast before with good results. A previous workplace used McAfee with nary a problem - and that was on seriously old machines too (NT4 / original Pentium).
Not everyone’s setup is the same. If you’re machine isn’t being driven into the ground by AV, good for you. But that doesn’t mean a thing. A lot of other people’s machines are severely affected. A lot.
E.g., I recently tried MS Security Essentials. It just killed the performance of the machine and then some. Even with scanning and such off. I had to uninstall it to get the machine back.
Every single “active” AV software suite I have tried on a variety of machines has done this.
These are just horribly written software packages. They only test on a few setups, not on a significant variety of machines. So they are completely clueless as to the effect their software has on some machines.
E.g., it is easy with today’s software writting suites to set things so a program never hogs a large percentage of the CPU and such. But they don’t bother doing this. And software bloat is everywhere.
As to the OP. Even a 500Mhz machine could easily handle a decently written AV suite. But since there are no such suites, gigahertz doesn’t matter. You could have a 20Ghz machine but the suite might still drive the PC into the ground.
My personal laptop is a Toshiba with a Pentium Dual-core processor and 3 gigs of ram, and am running AVG and Ad-aware for malware protection. When they’re operating passively (checking links and so forth), I don’t notice them at all. I don’t notice any slowdown when Ad-aware is scanning; I don’t only notice a slowdown with AVG’s scans if I tell it to take its scanning to top priority and am watching a movie or something simultaneously.
I don’t play computer games or make movies, so I don’t know if I would see anything if I tried doing those while scanning.
I didn’t even realize that AVG was doing this. I just checked my settings, and Link Scanner is active on my edition. I guess it can’t be slowing things down, because i’ve never had any trouble with performance on this computer.
I currently run AVG and MS Security essentials on a Q8300 Core 2 Quad processor with 6GB of RAM. My previous computer (P4 3.0GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed down noticeably during scans.
As ftg says, though, computer speed isn’t the only thing that influences AV’s effects on computer performance. Some fast new computers, due to the AV software itself, and to the combination of other software and settings on the computer, can still be adversely affected.
It is important,** ftg**. It means the premise of the OP’s question is flawed. It’s not how fast the computer is, but how it is set up, and what antivirus the person is using.
And I don’t think the program is necessarily poorly written if it works on the vast majority of machines. Sure, one that worked well on all machines would be better written, but that doesn’t mean anything less is poor.
And I’m sure you’ve already tried it, but, for anyone having problems, I use Avira Antivir, and only get 2% usage maximum except while doing a full scan. It has the lowest memory footprint I’ve seen (which will help a lot).