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Why do antivirus programs slow down a PC so much?
Swoogie
Member UncommonPosts: 399
PC's take a huge hit when a antivirus is installed and its understandable for a 5 sec increase on boot-up time but Mcafee makes my laptop (3 yrs old) take 30 more seconds to start up and my new i7-860 desktop around 6-7 more seconds. Im fine with the longer time for my PC but jeez its long on the laptop. Why is this ?
Comments
hard drive speed
Whaaa?
Get a less bloated piece of software. The Nortons and McAfees nowadays are packed with things you probably don't care about to justify them not being free. Like for McAfee, siteadvisor, parental controls, network monitoring, monitoring of miscellaneous programs like Outlook, etc.
Either disable some things if it lets you, or if all you want is 'antivirus', get a more straightforward software solution like Microsoft Security Essentials.
Depending on which anti-virus program you use and the settings you establish for it, an anti-virus program can look at any and all data movement onto and off of the hard drive for infections. This will significantly slow down any data transfer between the hard drive and the rest of the system.
Whaaa?
Well he is right [tho the lack of info is unhelpfull at best] But what e actually means is that such a program in order to do its job needs to read your stored Data on your hard Disk. Now if all your doing is running your Antivirus program on one of your egular cleaning sessions like i do then this wont be a problem. But if you are running another program then that program has to share the hard Drives 'read capacity'. And as there is only so much capacity it can cause traffic jams as programs wait for there turn to retrieve the needed information.
So yea basically the slower your hard drives reading speed the slower your computer gets. So your best solution to this problem is twofold.
1. If you feel it can be done and is benefitial get a less complicated Antivirus program with less unused features. This will help reduce the ammount of reading space it needs to run smoothly.
2. Get a faster hard Disk drive.
Another great example of Moore's Law. Give people access to that much space (developers and users alike) and they'll find uses for it that you can never imagine. "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates 1981
Well, you see, McAfee works by putting magical little elves in your computer.
The problem is, the gnomes don't fit as well in the casing on your laptop. But your desktop is much bigger and the goblins fit nice and snug in there.
Because a good metaphor for an anti-virus is that it is a crude and totally ineffective band-aid for users who can't stop bashing their heads against the wall until bloody. I am not trying to insult anybody, I am just promoting the idea that information, common sense, and firewalls can and should replace anti-virus software.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
I swear by Webroot Spysweeper with Antivirus. Great protection with a very small memory footprint. $39.95 gets you a one-year sub on THREE PC's.
I've had my computer since october 07. I've never had a virus, and i don't use antivirus (or a firewall for that matter).
Common sense is the best anti-virus.
That only dependable when you're the only one using your PC.
COMMAND ANTI-VIRUS V4 (CSAV)
The best in my option,vary low resources use.I have all my office machines 7 total on it.
Never a have a problem.
Trade in material assumptions for spiritual facts and make permanent progress.
I always swith the AV off when i am going (online)gaming .
Every AV takes some load off your cpu and memory , because they non stop controlling and protecting your system .