antivirus

whats the best antivirus for a old cpu

 

You do not state what operating system you are using but I gues it is possibly W98?
If so Fprot has both a windos version and even a DOS version which are low on resources. Here is the link for the DOS version: http://www.f-prot.com/products/home_use/dos/ and you will find a link for the Windows version on that page.

I am sure you will get more suggestions to try.

HTH Pilli

 

F-PROT, NOD32, Command (Authentium), Dr. Web, AVG, and now Avira/AntiVir are all low-footprint AV's for yer old box...

 

Depending on the amount of memory on your system, even KAV 5 Personal may be worth a trial.

I have been running it for several months on an ancient 400Mhz, 192MB computer without any slowdown whatsoever

Trial some of the AV's suggested and see which one suits you and your system the best.

 

I would have to disagree with the kav suggestion, i tried it on my computer Atholon 2200xp with 512DDR memory and it had one hell of an impact on it.

Try nod or mcafee enterprise 8. IMO

 

As with all software, just because KAV 5 slowed down your computer, does not mean it will have this effect on all systems.

That's why most people, including myself, suggest trialing software first, as all systems have different software/hardware combinations which may cause conflicts with a particular AV.

Therefore, bravesrule will not know whether KAV or any of the other suggestions are viable, unless he tests them out on his particular system setup.

Moreover, I have seen reports of all the 'lightweight' AV's having detrimental effects on some systems, but this should not be used as support in telling other people not even to test them out!

Incidentally, in my experience, on all my systems ( 4 computers ), KAV 5 runs as light as NOD or McAfee Enterprise edition

 

Just a comment, and I absolutely agree with your statement that different machines respond differently to any application depending on a whole host of factors..., but don't ignore the bottleneck factor.

If your AV (or any other software application) does not dominate the response time bottleneck, it will appear to be running light when, in fact, response time is dominated by some other system factor that is constant as AV's (or anything else for that matter) are changed. Those factors could be another application pulling on the CPU resources, a somewhat slow network connection, limited RAM resulting in a lot of RAM/disk swaps, or a slow rendering/video subsystem.

My experience with KAV, when I pay attention to system bottlenecks, is that it does impact apparent system response time. It's less apparent on my wife's PC, which has a slower video subsystem, runs a little lighter, and she doesn't page/context switch as much as I do. The net impact is not large, although if I'm in a hurry it's annoying, and I could see it completely disappear on a slower internet connection (right now I run at ~ 3 Mbps download) where serving of the downloaded information is the bottleneck, not local scanning of that information.

Blue

 

KAV 5 can be sped up by turning off the network protection and setting real time protection at the bottom position of the slider. There is also a registry hack to prevent the startup scan, available at forums.useice.com.

 

It's surprising how well an 'incompatible' AV will run on a system when you do not accept the default settings and apply a few tweaks

 

you can stop the start up scan in the kav 5 settings.

 

But in KAV 5 Personal this is only for the on-demand scanner, not for the Real-Time Protection settings. Therefore, you still need the registry hack

In KAV 5 Personal, however, I believe you can disable the Monitor startup scan from within the program

 

That it is I stand corrected.
bigc

 

But you were right for the new KAV WorkStation/Personal versions, where you no longer need to apply the registry tweak

As you can now stop the scan on startup from within the program;

Settings> user's tasks> automatic scan on application startup> schedule> untick "schedule task"