Does real-time file system scanning affect performance?

I excluded scanning from all my games and defragger. I also excluded a few files that didn't seem relevant to being scanned repeatedly.

Is that a safe practice? Does real-time scanning affect performance?

 

It can do, on occasion, hence the need for exclusion from scanning. What other files did you exclude.

 

Excluding any files is not safe. For instance, those files might get infected with a virus and no protection module would report the infection then. If there's a performance problem while scanning certain files, it's better to solve it with the help of Customer care than by excluding the files.

 

ESET seems to be the lightest on performance of any I've tried. In fact it's the only one that doesn't bring my older XP machine to it's knees.

I don't even know it's there on the windows 7 machine.

 

yeah, that's been the case with ESS on my little AMD Neo powered netbook (1.2GHz single core) - it's the only product i've used on that little guy that doesn't slow its boot time to a crawl or otherwise seriously negatively impact its already sad performance, haha.