What Really Slows Windows Down

The follow up experiment testing more software with improved benchmarks. If you want to know what applications are slowing down your machine, check out this post.

Results and Conclusions

Most people won't find anything too shocking here. One of the most surprising things to be gleamed from here is the blatant time and effort Symantec have gone to improve their product from the 2006 version. This won't help you if you own that version, but it should give you a good idea what to expect from Symantec in the future if you're determined to stick with their product line.

Overall

Here's the table of results for all three sections ranked by their overall performance degradation. The control times where:

• Boot Time: 70 seconds
• Prime: 26 seconds
• FileIO: 25seconds

Boot Delay

The boot delays were quite a lot smaller than last time, likely to be attributable to VMWare having a better grasp on its file system than Virtual PC, but the same names were at the top of this test.

Prime Delay

I wasn't expecting too much of a result from here. The prime delays would have come on systems where there were applications hogging resources.

FileIO Delay

The only applications this was going to affect were the system-monitors; those applications that require 100% attention on the file system, namely the security products.

Conclusions

Well it's clear to see what sort of application has most effect on Windows. Antivirus programs tether the performance of your computer alongside that of one three years its elder. If you really need an antivirus system, make sure you follow these benchmarks but also make sure you check how good the one you're looking at really is. Nod32 gets good security reviews and seems to leave the system fairly nippy

The new version of Norton has shocked me a little. Every year since their Norton AntiVirus 2002, they've added more and more "bloat". They call them features, and looking at the box, you'd agree. Features have traditionally come at a price though. If you're scanning more things, it's going to take it more time. NIS2007 seems to do all the work of 2006 but with significantly less load on the FileIO. I'm not shouting "go out and buy it" because of the massive boot delay and there are still better products.

If you're looking for the best of the best antivirus products you should look at their detection rates. There's no point in having something, no matter how expensive, if it cannot keep you protected. Here is an excellent roundup of anti-virus systems.

What next?

Next time I'll be expanding from where the Black Viper services guide took off and writing "What speeds Windows up". If you have any top tips regarding that, get them in and I'll make sure they're posted in that review.

Again, if the demand is high enough for another roundup of laggy applications, I'll do another one of those as well.

Pages

1. Introduction
2. The New Benchmarks
3. Norton Internet Security 2007
4. The Contenders
5. Results and Conclusions

Written by Oli on Friday, 22 September 2006. Tagged with benchmarks, windows, other. Read 191371 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

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#1 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

Glad to see that Norton straightened themselves out a little bit; however, that boot time is still way too high for me to worry about purchasing a copy of their software. I'll stick to "being careful."

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Michael Chase Anonymous User

#2 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

In reference to your forthcoming article, i've found the best way to speed windows up, is to un-install xp, install 98, and play the random delete file game from back when I only had a 800mb had drive and had to squeeze windows and half-life both on it! Delete files until something breaks, when it breaks, you know for the next install you cant delete that file.. ive had it around 20ish MB before :)...

Sorry, thats completely irrelevant, but I miss the good old days! Excellent article as always sir, your results proved the rough idea I had in my head of how the security products performed. I have to speed up a lot of Norton PC's for private customers when im freelancing. Ive recently gotten rid of Mcafee Enterprise 8 and replaced it with Avast much to my happyness! For speeding up windows, as well as the service tweaks, ive found TweakNow Powerpack2006 to be relatively useful, makes enough of a difference to notice, including boot times.

Cheers dude!

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skirky or eQuaZ0r Anonymous User

#3 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

Really great job on the "what slows windows" down. I've been recently trying to find on my own system what is causing large slow bootup times. I'm thinking that Google Desktop Sidebar / Search may be something interesting to check. ...and if you decide to check out antivirus suites, be sure to take a look at F-secure/Kasperky, recently rated as the "best" detecting antivirus and antispyware suite in its Internet Security offerings.

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Rattanjeet Anonymous User

#4 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

I would like to see yoru review the free Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic. http://www.free-av.com/

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bob jones Anonymous User

#5 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

Glad my computer doesn't need any of that crappy antivirus, spyware garbage...

its a Mac, and sweet as a nut.

Why do you guys put up with all that sh*t?

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Jon T Anonymous User

#6 — Author comment /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

@Jon

I don't put up with any of that shit... I still use windows, I just use Common Sense as my AV.

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Oli Numero Uno

#7 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

My opinion with watching Norton Internet Security over the last couple of years is that it is getting more and more bloated every release. Every release what they seem to be doing, is adding new features (which is fine by itself), but they add one or two more (new) background services in doing so every time, I am not sure how many services Norton Internet security runs on now, but it must be at least over 6 or 8 or even more, which is ridiculous really.

What I am experiencing in the real world is that a lot of people only have 256Mb of RAM and Norton Internet Security 2006 requires so much RAM that these PC's have no more physical RAM left over (even when no programs are running) and start using the swap file constantly and the PC comes to a crawl, taking Nortons off and using the XP2 firewall + AVG free edition uses much less RAM, runs less processes and the machines become much faster. Norton Internet Security 2006 appears to require at least 512Mb of RAM to prevent the swap file from being used constantly, which is far too much RAM used.

In my mind, what needs to happen with Norton Internet Security, is they need to combine a lot of the tasks into only a few services (i.e. optimize), instead of heaps of separate services/background tasks like it is now, I am sure a lot of RAM can be saved by optimizing sections of the code too. I have looked at PC's with only 256Mb of RAM running Norton Internet Security 2006, and Norton's is actually using MORE ram that Windows XP itself, which is getting ridiculous really, in my mind, Windows XP SP2 firewall + AVG free edition + Firefox to prevent spyware that comes through ActiveX holes is more than enough and doesn't require half as much RAM, but then again I primarily run Ubuntu myself.

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Rob Anonymous User

#8 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

Great Article, Was wondering if you could also run some tests on P2P apps, Emule/utorrent and some other media players like PowerDvd,WinDvd,Media Player Classic.

Also some other suggestions on software would be imgburn/dvddecrypter/photoshop/Kaspersky AV/Kerio Firewall/sygate/outpost

also to test it would be cool if a test was conducted which was ran before and after a defrag? That would be aswome

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CrisCr0ss Anonymous User

#9 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

You should not do performance tests in a virtual machine. Main reason is the condition of the host machine at the given moment. You know that that VM is just another application on the system that shares cpu and IO with the main system. True performance tests are done on a real machine where all tests are run on the same restored each time image.
There is one more thing that you should have mentioned in your tests. Do all security suites have a boot time driver that starts scanning when no user mode application has started? I doubt - namely, McAfee and Microsoft both scan in user mode meaning their boot time performance degradation in theory should be 0% but it is not. Norton's driver starts at the system time which means it scans during the boot file IO intensive process. This protects the machine for worms such as FunLove that infect just when the network drivers are up and functioning among other things. I think you should set all software to have the same options and then only run your tests.
Cheers,
Mike

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Mike Anonymous User

#10 /* 2 years, 11 months ago */

why NAV 2002 and the rest of the progs are new?

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meofcourse Anonymous User

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