Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Do Virus Scanners Slow Down Your System?

Does the presence of a virus scanner guarantee reduced performance, or does it have a negligible impact? We test 10 different products to see if you’re unknowingly suffering with security software.

Remember the days of Windows 98, when CPUs ran at triple-digit MHz speeds and slogged along with less than a gigabyte of RAM? Installing a resident program like a virus scanner often meant committing performance suicide. And heaven forbid a scheduled scan start up while you were actually at your desk. Productivity could literally grind to a halt. At least that’s how I remember things through the fog of time.

Today's personal computers are much more powerful than they were a few years ago, so perhaps the notion that an anti-virus application will still have a debilitating effect on performance is obsolete. Still, folks who began using computers after multi-core CPUs and gigabytes of RAM became the norm have likely never used a PC without a virus scanner installed. They'd have no way to relate to the days of running lean and mean to keep speed manageable. Now we have resources to spare. Cores sit idle, waiting for a task to execute, while low prices on memory make 6 GB and 8 GB kits affordable for even mainstream users.

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