Comments for What Really Slows Windows Down

Great articles nails the the nail on the head.

Sorry for Symantec but their product are terrible at hogging system resources and do not like to play nice with another cometetive software on a computer. Trying to uninstall Symantec software from a computer means a complete Format & Window re-install. If I was Peter Norton, I would be ashame to have let Symantec use my name. So much so that I would shoot myself.

I have had so many bad experience with Symantec Software over the past 10 years that I strictly refuse to have any piece of their software on my systems. Even to the point of telling my employer that hey better keep that laptop of their if Symantec is mandated by them, I prefer to have my own and live Symantec Free!

Thanks You for such a great article

Best Regards from Montreal, Canada

Robert Charron

mac sucks the os is not reaaly user friendly windows altough vulnerable to viruses its easy to use simple add and remove plug and play exct my friend had a mac and it was always crashing and adding and removing programes werent so easy my boss also had the same problems with his mac thats why mac has so many comercials, theyre not selling as much as pc

what about just Norton 2007 AV? cause i have that not the internet package now i have never found to many issues with norton and tbh i don't care if it takes ages to boot my computer sucks anyway so i don't know which one takes longer. so if ya can tell me would help.

We don't put up with it :P

Any windows user with more than 1 brain cell can avoid the need for continual anti-virus and malware scans. It's all those who dont have a clue that need it.

Most of the developers I know will just run a scan every few weeks over night and thats only just in case.

And yeah thats the nice thing about buying someing hardly any one uses like a Mac ... your safe from scrutiny.

Extremely interesting and informative!

F-Secure and Google Desktop Sidebar would be greatly appreciated, though. (F-Secure is bundled by most ISP here in Finland, so it has a huge userbase here.)

I'd like to see a benchmark for FortiClient. It's an AV/IPS/web filter/firewall and I haven't noticed any slowdown or stability problems on my machine since I've installed it. I've used McAfee, F-Prot and F-Secure and this one looks like a winner. I'd like to see some benchmarks to know I'm not going crazy :)

Great post! I only miss one anti virus software. Symantec AntiVirus (Enterprise Edition).

I followed to the link to the independently-rated AV programs, thanks for including it. Kaspersky was ranked tops there. Sadly it wasn't rated here based on system performance effect. So it's still tough to figure out which is the "best" AV software to use.

Me? I used to use ZoneAlarm Pro Suite, but got tired of all the false-alarms, questions, etc that popped up. So I switched to Norton Internet Security 2007, which works well for me. I don't notice performance problems and boot time is pretty good. I'm not saying the tests above are wrong, just that the performance hit seems acceptable to me (and I'm pretty picky!).

There are many things which slow xp with little cpu laoding. This must involve some sort of process and or resource locking. Anyone notice how windows freezes when having problems accessing the dvd/cdrom drive? Does anyone know what is really going on? It just seems this is a design issue with windows that has never been fixed.

cause the alternative is ...well a mac, simple