Comments for What Really Slows Windows Down

How about testing Symantec Antivirus Corporate 10.1?

> Glad my computer doesn't need any of that crappy antivirus, spyware garbage...
> its a Mac, and sweet as a nut.


I guess you can't read, huh?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798

Yeah, glad my pc doesnt cost much to update hardware and software.

Why do all you guys put up with all that shit.

Macs are no better for secrurity as proved in the past. Just because noyone wants to make nastys for computer that resembles a nice looking iron, doesnt mean that your mac is safe.

I thought I had a comment but when I saw "Gravatar" supported, I now would like to ask what that is. I am sorry because I am sure it is supposed to go in another forum. Not being here much is not a good thing to do as it would seem that I have missed a lot. (had to format drive etc, etc with DELL and I am not a happy camper at the moment. And this topic is certainly relevant at the moment.
Thanks for helping with this topic cuzzin' I need to figure out what has happened to my laptop.
Edit comment as necessary.
Joanne

I would like to see how Norton AV 2006 and Norton SystemEWorks 2006 did in your tests. Thanks.

You completely loose credibility by refering to virus.gr as an excellent round up of anti-virus systems. Virus.gr does not replicate or test samples. Simply put, the more false positives the better the rating. Both av-test.org and av-comparatives.org offer far superior testing than virus.gr will ever be able to. False positives do not make for great AV software.

it would be great to a roundup of just anti-virus scanners -- bear in mind that some products are on demand not on-access, and so while they don't slow down windows, they also may not protect you against infected files already on your system.
I have used dozens of different AV products -- there is serious load-time and memory bloat with NORTON and MCAFEE and PANDA's software, alternatives like AVG, NOD, F-PROT, ANTIVIR, VET and AVAST are faster to load, but not nearly as user friendly, and the full disk scanning takes countless hours. I've found KASPERSKY amongst the best for performance and usability, as well as topping the reliability ranks.
it would be great to see what the real penalty is with these complete scans -- many of them can slow a P4/3Ghz/2Gb down to crawling speed while it goes through the process, and most AV programs don't have a usable background option -- if only they could background scan by sectors like modern defragging tools (eg. diskeeper).
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As for Macs, Jon T -- with Mac-OSX now on Intel PCs, and Windows Vista being touted by the industry as the LAST incarnation of Microsoft's OS, one has to imagine we may all be using Mac's OS in a few years from now, and all viruses will be written for it... your immunity won't last long. In fact you likely already have Trojans on your system stealing your personal information.

If you do another test like this, I'd suggest that you also measure approximately how much RAM is used by the application, and, just for completeness, how much disk space. The amount of disk space is probably irrelevant, but many/most of the computers that I look at are memory-bound, so applications which more memory will slow the system for other things even if the application in question uses almost no CPU time.

Also, if you test again, please add .NET 1.1; some applications use it and not 2.0, and I've noticed that one or the other (not sure which) has a very noticeable effect on speed on older computers.

As for speedups, many apps come with background updaters (Sun java, older Quicktime, RealPlayer) and some with launch accelerators (MS Office, OpenOffice, and Adobe Reader). Also, some apps leave a stub running in memory when you close them, presumably so that they'll start up faster next time (Adobe Reader, IE7). The new Quicktime (or maybe it's iTunes?) has an updater running as a scheduled task, which I think is much better; nothing sitting around in memory all the time just to wait for the update check.

Check out McAfee SpamKiller on Outlook. I have never seen such a slow down before.