AVG Free 7.5 Interesting Issue - *0* MB Memory Usage!!

[kurdadam]

I have just installed the new AVG Free 7.5 and while playing I disabled *all* of its services from "Services" screen of XP. Those were the "Alert Manager" and the "Update Service". I also disabled the Scheduler.

And finally, I disabled the AVG Control Center from startup items of XP.

Then I restarted the computer. There is virtually no sign of AVG to be running on the computer. In Task Manager there are *no* AVG related items. On services list everything related to AVG are stopped and disabled.

And what is the point, you may ask.. Well, REALTIME PROTECTION STILL WORKS!!

When I try to download Eicar Test Virus or try to activate one of many viruses in my collection it does not allow on the kernel level.. Windows gives an error message saying that it cannot access the file. Virus is certainly blocked. Of course, there is no AVG message regarding the virus since the Control Center is disabled but the protection is there.

This lowers the still low memory footprint of AVG to near-zero.

Would like to hear what you think.

PS. Of course the guard was left running in the control center before I disable it and remove from startup items. It remembers the last state of the realtime guard even the computer is restarted and even no AVG component is running!!

[farmerlee]

Running avg 7.5 normally only uses around 2mb of ram on my system which i find amazing!

[i_g]

And the conclusion is... you don't see everything in Task Manager (and even what you see might be quite hard to interpret correctly). If the memory is allocated in the driver, you won't see it in Task Manager's process list even if it were 100MB.

You don't believe a program can be running (and working) with no memory allocated, do you? ;)

[kurdadam]

Of course it uses some memory in order to work. But this is the first time I see an AV working without anything in Task Manager and the memory usage difference between AVG running and not is very very small.

[i_g]

-{ Quote: "... and the memory usage difference between AVG running and not is very very small." }-
I was just trying to say that you don't know that - AVG could have allocated 100MB of memory and you wouldn't know (I'm not saying it does, just that you don't have the information that it's very small).

[kurdadam]

-{ Quote: "I was just trying to say that you don't know that - AVG could have allocated 100MB of memory and you wouldn't know (I'm not saying it does, just that you don't have the information that it's very small)." }-

Actually, I was trying to say that the difference between the memory usage when AVG is not even installed on the system *and* running without any processes is very small.. I think this clears things up.

[i_g]

-{ Quote: "Actually, I was trying to say that the difference between the memory usage when AVG is not even installed on the system *and* running without any processes is very small..." }-
Yes... but how do you know that the difference is small?

[kurdadam]

-{ Quote: "Yes... but how do you know that the difference is small?" }-

I check the total memory usage on Windows before and after installing the AV software.