Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now flies

Since KAV 4 was released many people, including myself, have reported that it is a resource hog with 'typical' installation selected. This problem was seen even with very high spec machines.

With accepting this default installation (with the Control Centre installed) and the default Monitor Settings I found that KAV used up about 54mB of memory and slowed down my computer considerably ( Pentium 4, 512mB memory). Despite e-mailing Kaspersky both in Russia and the UK I received no replies so I relegated KAV to a backup scanner.

However, support at the Kaspersky UK site eventually contacted me( my previous e-mails had gone to an old address) this week and over several e-mails with suggestions I have now found that the Monitor has virtually no impact on my CPU.

I have found the following steps to be crucial for the KAV Monitor being able to run in the background without little effect on system resources;

1. Do not accept the 'typical installation' - accept 'custom' installation and deselect 'Control Centre' from the options given.

2. Once you have installed KAV and rebooted, right click on the monitor in the system tray and choose 'Monitor settings'.

3. In 'Scan files of the following types' - choose 'all infectable'

4. In 'Scan compound files' I have none of the boxes selected. Some of these compound files if selected will slow down your computer considerably and the program brings up a box warning you of this if these options are chosen.


However, I have selected everything in the KAV Scanner options.

With the above settings KAV now only takes up between 11-20mB memory with the Monitor running and there is no impact on the speed of my computer( I have also tried these settings on a Pentium 3 with only 256mB memory and again there was very little impact on the speed of this computer).

My experiences with KAV emphasise the importance of good support with any (AV) software and the importance of not always accepting the default settings offered to you.

I have now 'promoted' KAV 4 to my main scanner and within one hour it found and deleted a trojan trying to enter my system.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Hi Blackcat,
I have now signed up to this forum, so when I have time

I will pop by and try to answer users queries.
I see one of our Russian colleagues - Igor Kurzin is already here and I think Ram will also sign up.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Welcome aboard Lisa. I think it is great for Kaspersky to have people participate in this forum.
Kaspersky has always been an outstanding product, but ran into some problems with version 4. It is not the only program that ran into difficulties when it had to adapt to Windows XP and I understand that. However, there is a little "damage control" that needs to be done by Kaspersky, and I think the new forum and having team members here will help accomplish that.
I hope you can keep us informed of the progress of KAV 5. I will renew my Kaspersky liscense when it is released.
I hope everyone from Kaspersky enjoys their visits here. You may meet people that choose products from your competitors, but everyone here is the cream of the crop, interested in the best protection, and are here to learn or assist others, or both.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Thanks for posting that info, Blackhat. I'm sure others will find it useful.

I just want to add that, as root noted, the problems noted by users of version 4 is why I did not consider KAV when I was in the market for a new AV, especially since I had only an old w98 pc at the time. (I thought running KAV's older version on W98 was only a stop gap measure and not a longterm solution for an AV.) Then when I bought a new XP pc, reports of KAV's excess resource use and performance hit on even higher end XP pc's still kept me away from KAV.

I hope that whatever resource use issues that may exist with version 4 get ironed out. Although Blackhat was finally provided with a solution that would not necessarily be readily evident to a user, still to me it would seem best if such "workarounds" were not required in order to use the product and maintain PC performance.

So if KAV 5 is in the works, I too look forward to it as a product I can add for consideration.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Perhaps if the above recommended settings were the default settings it would make the initial use sweet and easy , especially for peoples ,like myself, who are not that clued up with having to make too many adjustments.
(just a thought) Also welcome to Lisa, Its great that we have such a wealth of expertise with yourself and igor who are able to pop in now an again , Thank you

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Warm welcome Lisa and Igor !!!
Many thanks for coming to the forum !

Best Regards, Jan.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Welcome, Wilders is truly becoming a 'one stop shop' for support these days, its great to see.

And a fine post too Blackcat, lets hope it helps some people with troubles.


Kev




edit typos.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome,
I hope I can help with users questions when I pop by.

In answer to Solarpowered Candle the default settings are the ultimate settings for detection, however some options can be switched off and allow the system to run more lightly.

I personally use a PIII 128MB RAM 11gig HDD running Win98se and run Kav for Workstation 4.0.9.0 quite happily, all I have turned off is Network scanning - so it is now in effect Kav Personal, and turned off Scan Memory and I work on this pc every day and have done so for past 4 years.

A lot of issues can also be addressed by taking a look at what programs you have loading into start up, too many and not only does W98 complain but all these applications will need to be scanned at each start up. There are some applications that can conflict with a memory resident scannere.g. HP Background Status Monitor.
Try to minimise these start up programs by unticking uncessary ones by using Start->Run->MSCONFIG and go to Startup tab and untick any you don't use, if you then reboot and you have unticked something you need you can always go back in and retick it.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Dear BC
>1. Do not accept the 'typical installation' - accept 'custom' installation and deselect 'Control Centre' from the options given<
--------
Tho' I agree with you, I see following disadvantages of not having CC:

a] no password enabling for shutdown/closing monitor: Enabling pwd for AV monitor is important due new v's can
shutdown active or resident AV components.

b] no auto-updating/scheduling updates is there: someone told me windows scheduler can do updates but in v4 on Win98SE I never got it to work !

In new version if both above elements can be moved out of CC UI into Scanner UI and/or Monitor UI it would be trulyexcellent !

Just my most humble two cents<g>

SKA

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Welcolm aboard Lisa.

Lisa is the main contact at Kaspersky UK and I can safely say that she responds very quickly to any queries ( within hours).

Hope you stay around here with Igor then Kaspersky will have some feedback about our problems and suggestions for future products e.g KAV 5 and Antihacker 2 !!!!!

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Welcome Lisa, and Blackcat you are wrong, she responds within minutes not hours

I was a little disappointed when 4.0.9 of Personal edition gave me a memory exception in the resident Monitor as up until then I had been very impressed with the product compared to all the others I'm evaluating to replace bloated NAV.

As ForumAdmin said though, we need some public forums like this at Kaspersky as we can't start turning Wilders into a dedicated KAV support forum and infringe on NOD.

Anyway, it's good to have representatives from other AV vendors around to give their views on subjects.

Fedorov.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Hi,

For about a year I've been using KAV on my windows XP machine and I have not experienced the problem with overutilization of resources (at least I don't notice any slowdown on 1.33GHZ Athlon, 512MB pc2100). I'm guessing it is because I am using pretty old versions of the KAV components:
-- Monitor= v4.0.1.34
-- Scanner=v4.0.1.54
-- core components==v4.0.0.27

Memory usage is usually around 20MB total (10MB monitor / 10MB AVPCC).

My question is, am I missing out on any important features by not upgrading to the newest versions? I am tempted not to risk it after hearing about the heavy resource usage of the newer versions. Plus I have not had any problems with it so far, other than rarelock-ups during the "update AV bases" task I have scheduled for startup.

It's time for me to renew my license in a couple of weeks, and I'm considering whether or not to try out NOD32 instead. Tough choice because I really like KAV; it's been very dependable for the two years I've used it. I had to email their support staff a couple of times because of problems with my license key, and they responded literally within a couple of hours and were very helpful. The only complaint I have with it is that the documentation can be hard to follow.

 

Re:Importance of good support/ not accepting default options-KAV Monitor now fli

Hello, Smashing!

You may keep on using your current version. Presently there's no newer version with significant changes in functionality. You would want to install latest version only if you experienced problems in speed or worked with multi-RAR archives (some similar bugs were fixed).

Regards,
Igor.