Panda Cloud AV on old PCs.

Nothing to do with effectiveness but lately had to "fix" a couple of PCs where the owner was "sure" they must have somehow got a virus. Turned out in both cases that they (or in one case a short-term lodger who was genuinely trying to help) had installed PCA Free, both machines were low spec by current standards (AMD K6-2 500mhz 384MB RAM , PII 333mhz 512MB RAM) but they had chosen PCA because it has low resource use.

Bottom line is that for random periods of time 'PSANHost.exe" would grab all spare CPU cycles taking total to 100%, the IU effectively frozen. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

I've noticed the same behavior on older pc's as well as those with network shares.

 

The "Installation Requirements" don't mention a minimum CPU spec. Maybe they need to make a recommendation!

 

No - I tried several AV on my old PC but Panda Cloud AV is the lightest one

 

That's what these guys thought too. Here's a shot from one before it got the chop.

 

Odd it should not be running like that normally, I have it running on a 256 MB running fine. Was this after the first install? Did you run a scan to build its cache?

What other programs did the machine have running? I have only seen it run with high CPU with large programs running but it always dropped back down as soon as it was done scanning it.

 

Check I/O Reads/Writes of "PSANHost.exe" and you will be astonished to see huge values there.

 

+1 I try this AV about every 3-4 months to see if it is improved, but thus far I have not liked it in terms of resource usage or zero-day protection.

 

I honestly can't remember what other programs were running at the time. I ran a scan the day before and did notice that CPU use was no more than 25% at any time (and consequently the scan was slow but I kind of expected that with a primarily cloud-based detection)

 

think it was recomended after installing panda to reboot pc 4,5,6 times

 

Same story here.
Got rid of it (even if I had bought a license) and installed Immunet Protect Plus instead.
Much better, and takes much less resources. (running a PIII with 512MB)
Maybe I'll try Panda cloud again in the future, but development seems quite slow. (at least they're not in a hurry to fix things)

 

In the first period after install PCAV also still needs to get to know your PC, so that after quite some files don't have to be scanned again everytime. You can accelerate this process easily by doing a full scan

 

This was supposed to be fixed long time ago.

http://blog.cloudantivirus.com/2009/07/21/known-issue-with-beta2-synchronous-background-scan/

 

Really? I wasn't there to count but I think they would have complied. Seems like an odd requirement though.

That's what I was trying to do by running the scan. It took a whole day and didn't seem to make any difference (remember, this is an old PC.) Thanks for the suggestion.

Very interesting. This would have been the latest version, is it 1.1.2? I can't remember seeing a 'Background Scan' toggle as Pedro suggested there would be but I'll have a look for it on another PC which has PCA Free tomorrow.

The most serious apparent effect was when playing an mp3. Opening the XP volume/mixer UI would suspend and sometimes crash, the player. Does the background scan keep a record of such "clean" files and so not have to scan them on-access?

 

Note to mods.
Can't help noticing missing posts from this thread, including one of mine.
You're probably very busy but an explanation or at least an acknowledgement would be nice.

 

Follow up to earlier post

It was PCA 1.1.2
Can't find "Background Scan" Disable/Enable option.
Have applied the registry hack just to see if the user comments either way.

 

Panda is definitely not the best choice but honestly speaking for this case it is not the guilty one . Whatever modern antivirus you put on these configuration , it will slow down the computer dramatically. Windows XP SP3 just itself requires more to run .

 

Yes, with specs that low, any modern AV would slow the computer down a lot. Avast 5 may be an option though with custom install with only file shield and behaviour shield or network shield. Other AV's that allow custom install may be an option too and try putting the realtime filesystem protection to on execution only. Limited user account and sandboxed browser are also very nice for those slow PC's.

 

I know. All the services running in the background, .NET Framework 4 stuff that wasn't even thought of when AMD etched the K6, require CPU cycles, and this ol' hardware just aint got much to go 'round.

(Very quietly while nobody's "listening", I have changed the two PCs in my first post to another product but I won't mention its name in this thread because last time I did my post got deleted. )

EDIT: @BoerenkoolMetWorst. Didn't see your post before. Are you reading my mind?

 

I've started using the new AVG Free Edition 2011 instead of PCA to see what it's like. One thing that's really clear is PCA installs quickly. AVG Free Edition is a big download and takes much longer to install on a low spec machine. That's a drag when you're working in the field. I'm not sure how it compares RE resources yet.

 

Yes, I've just successfully finished my long-distance mind reading course for beginners.

 

If any of you are experiencing high memory usage a few people have reported it to the Panda cloud forums and a solution is being worked on. So far one possibility for high CPU usage has been posted with a small fix to test:


http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum/thread.jspa?threadID=55071&tstart=0