Originally Posted By: Familyguy
I'm unaware of any of the big name virus/security suites that aren't absolute pigs with system resources. For people around me that insist on running windows, I've been recommending Avast. It is gentle on system resources, stays out of the way, and is very good about flagging naughty bits. Combined with an occasional run with Spybot Search and Destroy, even the most careless person can enjoy relatively good protection without their "security suite" feasting on their system resources and slowing their computer to a crawl.
http://www.avast.com/ http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
You'll be amazed at how much snappier your machine will be.
I just had two computers through my hands that I traded out NIS for Avast! One had 25 hits from the offline scanner plus 4 more from the first run of Avast! The second one didn't get used as much; it only had 18 on the offline scan and nothing on the Avast! first run. I had a little trouble shoe-horning Avast! into one because it only had 360MB memory and way too much crud set to autorun. I thinned down the autorun by half but it's still a paperweight for about the first 90 seconds after the desktop first appears. The real pig seems to be the scanner that checks inbound web traffic. The other had almost nothing set autorun and also had ~700MB and it runs Avast! without any trouble.
This was just another example of the uselessness and frustration I've gotten from Norton products going back at least a decade. Ol' Peter should have stuck to debuggers and searching for bad hd sectors and not cashed Symantec's check.
I'm unaware of any of the big name virus/security suites that aren't absolute pigs with system resources. For people around me that insist on running windows, I've been recommending Avast. It is gentle on system resources, stays out of the way, and is very good about flagging naughty bits. Combined with an occasional run with Spybot Search and Destroy, even the most careless person can enjoy relatively good protection without their "security suite" feasting on their system resources and slowing their computer to a crawl.
http://www.avast.com/ http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
You'll be amazed at how much snappier your machine will be.
I just had two computers through my hands that I traded out NIS for Avast! One had 25 hits from the offline scanner plus 4 more from the first run of Avast! The second one didn't get used as much; it only had 18 on the offline scan and nothing on the Avast! first run. I had a little trouble shoe-horning Avast! into one because it only had 360MB memory and way too much crud set to autorun. I thinned down the autorun by half but it's still a paperweight for about the first 90 seconds after the desktop first appears. The real pig seems to be the scanner that checks inbound web traffic. The other had almost nothing set autorun and also had ~700MB and it runs Avast! without any trouble.
This was just another example of the uselessness and frustration I've gotten from Norton products going back at least a decade. Ol' Peter should have stuck to debuggers and searching for bad hd sectors and not cashed Symantec's check.