Anti Virus Slowdown


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Opinions needed please. I usually recommend Avast Free to my family, clients and friends, but a couple of my friends have computers  with 2gb RAM and they say that since installing Avast it's causing their browsers to take a long time to open and load the homepage. One told me that Chrome is taking 15 to 25 seconds to load. Any ideas on a free AV that won't slow them down on 2gb RAM. I heard good things about Panda Free, Bitdefender Free and 360 Internet Security.  Any thoughts are appreciated. :)  

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Yep, that was my suggestion too but at the time there's some money and personal matters one of them is going through so he's trying to make the best at what he has. Any ideas ? I may just tell him to try Panda Free, it supposed to be pretty light and easy on low spec machines.

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There are options you could do one of the following:

 

  • add more RAM (2gb ram to the 2gb machine or more. Such as 2GB plus 2GB current = 4GB  ram you have total.)
  • 360 TS app
  • FF

Chrome is good but do not run many tabs on 2GB ram or you will have slowdowns. FF included.

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On older computers I was installing antiviruses that came with the Office plugin (e.g. AVG) and then turning off the realtime scan except for external drives. That way all downloads and attachments are scanned, all USB drives are scanned and there's no slowdown at all for normal computer activity. That of course knowing that once you get infected by one of the recent viruses there's almost zero chance that the antivirus would be able to remove the infection that would have likely borrowed too much inside the OS through rootkits to avoid any sort of detection (sometimes they elude, through encryption/polymorphism, even scans made with bootable CDs).

 

Anyway, malware devs are ALWAYS steps ahead of antiviruses, when you visit infected pages there's an extremely, unbelievably low chance the antivirus would identify the payload (it's already a miracle that sometimes they catch the exploit code), it's far more important to lock down the browser to the bare minimum plugins (e.g. only Flash and making sure it auto-updates) and blocking executables downloads with passwords (e.g. with FFox and Public Fox). Antiviruses no longer offer reliable protection, the revolutionary "heuristic algorithms" have always been pretty much a joke, reducing the attack surface should always be the first priority.

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On older computers I was installing antiviruses that came with the Office plugin (e.g. AVG) and then turning off the realtime scan except for external drives. That way all downloads and attachments are scanned, all USB drives are scanned and there's no slowdown at all for normal computer activity. That of course knowing that once you get infected by one of the recent viruses there's almost zero chance that the antivirus would be able to remove the infection that would have likely borrowed too much inside the OS through rootkits to avoid any sort of detection (sometimes they elude, through encryption/polymorphism, even scans made with bootable CDs).

 

Anyway, malware devs are ALWAYS steps ahead of antiviruses, when you visit infected pages there's an extremely, unbelievably low chance the antivirus would identify the payload (it's already a miracle that sometimes they catch the exploit code), it's far more important to lock down the browser to the bare minimum plugins (e.g. only Flash and making sure it auto-updates) and blocking executables downloads with passwords (e.g. with FFox and Public Fox). Antiviruses no longer offer reliable protection, the revolutionary "heuristic algorithms" have always been pretty much a joke, reducing the attack surface should always be the first priority.

 

Plus when you do use flash, block flash on a need to use basis with something like Flashblock. For Firefox.

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