Proof that Antivirus software makes your PC crawl
Posted by George Ou @ 4:06 am
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A few months ago I declared: "It's time to toss out your (desktop) antivirus software!"  
As far as I was concerned, running desktop antivirus software was a liability in and of itself because 
"Running antivirus on a personal computer is like having the bomb squad inspect a suspicious package 
inside the house right next to you."  The effectiveness of antivirus software is also questionable 
since it won't work at all for zero-day exploits that haven't been updated yet.  Well now there 
seems to be another good reason to toss out that antivirus software.

Everyone has always suspected antivirus software of slowing computers down (at least through 
anecdotal evidence), but no one has ever been able to really quantify it precisely.  
A young English gentleman in the UK who goes by "Oli" has posted this wonderful analysis 
on "What really slows Windows down" and posted some detailed measurements on the effects 
of typical desktop software and security suites.

The desktop Antivirus suites all appear to make your PC run slower than a 5 year old computer 
when it comes to slowing hard drive I/O down which is the biggest factor in PC wait times.  
Norton Internet Security 2006 was the worst resource hog, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 was 
the second worst, but Norton Internet Security 2007 seemed to have improved to the third 
worst resource hog.  Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 was the fourth worst resource hog and 
Microsoft's Live OneCare had significantly lower overhead.  Surprisingly, AVG 7.1 free antivirus 
software came in with extremely low overhead compared to any of the other Antivirus suites 
so if you must run something, AVG might be the way to go and you certainly can't argue with the price.

As anyone who knows me would know, I personally never use Antivirus or Anti-spyware software 
and neither has most of my expert friends or colleagues and we never get viruses even while 
running as full administrator.  When my family members use the computer, I set them to 
standard users and the worst I'll ever need to do is nuke their account and recreate it 
if something bad happens.  I'm also careful to only give them read only access to family 
photos and files so that they can't ever accidentally delete them or click on some Malware 
that would delete them.  Now how do I know I don't have any viruses?  I do manually conduct 
occasional scans of the hard drive for viruses and spyware and I never find any.