I hate Antivirus programs. I hate that I want to use them, and I hate that without exception by the very definition of what they have to do, they slow your PC down significantly. With every new release, they seem to slow you down more and more as their database becomes necessarily larger and hence uses more memory and takes longer to search. I hate them nearly as much as I hate viruses. I also hate that on the whole they're totally useless, often failing to detect 80% of real life threats.

Obviously I could just use a different OS, but I really like XP and it runs all the software I want to use. I'm not changing.

I'm currently trialling "G Data" and I have to say it's the worst I've ever used. With a memory footprint of about 1GB and a CPU overhead of 50% constantly on a dual core processor, it causes applications to hang repeatedly to the point where even typing this post is ann (pause) oying. I think it particularly hates FF because I've been having trouble with it ever since. I was blaming Flash, but I have no Flash open now and it's still grinding... I think it's also trashing uTorrent which is usually so light you can't tell it's there, often only showing a few seconds CPU time after an entire week of running.

AVG used to be quite light weight, but it was never actually very good at preventing viruses and then it got really fat and troublesome.

The MS essentials antvirus was great when it came out, but not only has it become fat and slow but it's now constantly crashing on both the machines I have using it.

McAffee slowed down my laptop to the point that it was completely unusable.

Pandapops is slow and ineffective.

Sophos has directly wasted several weeks of my life for various reasons I could write an entire play around.

Norton, I really don't care if it's now a million times better than the versions that have traumatised myself and many of my friends and clients. Their sins are irredeemable.

I did use Auntie Vera which was mostly excellent, but for some reason it I had to get rid of it. I can't remember why now, so maybe I should try it again because this <15 minute pause as G Data hangs machine yet again> seriously does not work.

So, what are your experiences?

In particular, can anyone name an effective product that provides real time protection while not using over 9000 memories and all your processing power?

Screen shot of my PC after a reboot, which takes almost 4 hours since installing G Data:



Note the CPU usage, and the combined VM size of about 1.5 gigs...

I like Avast.

We use GData 2010 at work, mainly because it only uses around 8MB - a lot of the machines are still on 256MB RAM. It is a processor hog, though, and can slow down read/write performance drastically.

I use Microsoft Security Essentials on my private machines. Relatively small and light, I haven't noticed that it has bloated and I haven't seen any stability problems (1 x 512MB / 1.6Ghz Pentium M laptop, 1 x 4GB / Q6600 desktop, 1 x 8GB / Core i7 laptop), one with XP Pro, the other two with Windows 7 64-bit.

That's why I tried it. However, as you can see from the screen shot above my experience was hugely different. The AVK and GD processes belong to GData.

I only saw one option on their website. Did I miss something?

I've now uninstalled GData, and my commit charge is back down to 340MB and FF is working smoothly again.

Nick, for some reason I've not tried Avast yet. I'll do that right now, thanks for reminding me of it.

It probably doesn't matter now, but do you know what was causing the CPU usage? It's not any of the processes shown in the screen shot, DPCs maybe?

Using Avast here (fairly unenthusiastically).

Grisoft AVG free with Agnitum Outpost firewall free running XP SP3 in VB on a 20" iMac
backed up spybot S&D, spywareblaster, ccleaner and windows defender

the combination of AVG and the new outpost seems to work very well …

It showed as Kernel usage, but I did not investigate further. It's back to normal now I've uninstalled it.

I'm using Auntie Vera here under openSUSE 11.2

It might not be the same for XP but for me it's using pretty much f*ck all.

You can't go wrong with Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Unobtrusive and fairly lightweight.

Which version of the program and databases were you using? They released a patch earlier this year, which went from 8MB to around 512MB, then the next update fixed the problem and it went back down to under 10MB... A big problem on a fleet of machines with 256MB RAM!

I downloaded it last week, and it was the only version I could see on the website. The installer file says: G Data AntiVirus 2011 21.0.2.1

The worst impact was on Firefox; it was as if it took 5 minutes to scan every cache access. Running Speedtest, it reduced me to 0.1Mb/s although sometimes it would hang for 10 minutes and then report a stupidly high figure like 3Gb/s presumably because of an overflow error! Uninstalling it has completely eliminated the problem, so I have little doubt it was G Data causing it.

Maybe it was incompatible with my pet spyware.

Hmm, never seen any performance drop in Firefox. It slows file transfers by about 20%, at worse, but nothing worse...

On my work machine, AVKCI.exe uses 668KB (user) and 1MB (System), the proxy uses 988KB and GDScan uses 1.6MB. Dated 27.01.2010.

I can only assume that old GD 2010 is being updated separately from the 2011 version I downloaded?

Rather like AVG did with the nice light version they used to do, which is no longer available...

The free Avira AntiVir Personal and Comodo Firewall have a small footprint on XP. Seem to do the job.

I have them on the ancient laptop and they seem to be the most friendly and don't thrash its little old components to death.

The only thing is the free pop up advert that comes everytime it updates but 1 click for a free product is no biggy.