PCFormat Forum Archive

Afternoon all ye AV experts,

I've got an old Compaq lappie that needs to be brought back to life for my father.
He needs to be able to access his gmail and type the odd word doc on it. So nothing heavy.
Unfortunately the internet will invite some nasties to join him and his laptop so i need some sort of AV.

The specs of the laptop are as follows.. *no sniggering pls*

P3 - 650mhz
192MB RAM
10 Gig HDD
Clean install of Win XP Home SP3
The usual other stuff...DVD/Sound/Blah Blah

I installed BitDefender 2009 AV and the poor thing almost didn't start up at all. I just destroyed the processor - sat at 100% continuously.
Tried Nod32, slightly better but still rendered the laptop unusable.
I was wondering if any of the free AV's are any lighter on cpu/ram? Anti-vir, AVG, Avast?

Nod32 is too intensive? Hectic...I don't even notice it on my laptop.

AVG is fairly intensive when it does...well...anything.

Surely the money spent on the AV could be put towards a RAM upgrade for the lappie?

you tried bitdefender?

you HAVE to tell tribble that!

i know it sounds like i'm evangelising here, but have you considered *nix?.. on those specs, you need a resource friendly OS... and the requirements aren't all that strenuous...

i have seen an old p1 running full-effects compiz on 384MB RAM... (some dinky FX5### gpu)...

wot he said

UrBaN wrote:Nod32 is too intensive? Hectic...I don't even notice it on my laptop

I know, thought it would be OK.

UrBaN wrote: Surely the money spent on the AV could be put towards a RAM upgrade for the lappie?

Well this is the thing, i don't really want to throw money at a 9 year old laptop. BitDefender and Nod32 are sitting on my shelf, so i could try them without having to pay anything.
When they both failed me, i sought professional advice about any of the free AV's from the PCF panel

I thought maybe the laptop was just dying, but as soon as i uninstall either of the two AV's it performs fine.

Stuart wrote:you tried bitdefender

I have a free 6 month subscription which I never used so i thought i'd try it on the laptop. Was very processor intensive

rustypup wrote: i know it sounds like i'm evangelising here, but have you considered *nix?.. on those specs, you need a resource friendly OS... and the requirements aren't all that strenuous...

Yup, it works fine with Puppy Linux, i ran it for a couple of years with that OS and it was quite happy.
However my father is just not going to handle anything that is even slightly different from XP. He still doesn't understand copy/paste or that there is even a 'right-click' option on a mouse.

Have you tried setting up a free firewall or something instead?

Or, faster than actually doing a virus scan on that laptop, youcould rip the HDD out and scan it in a fast PC

UrBaN wrote:Have you tried setting up a free firewall or something instead?

Or, faster than actually doing a virus scan on that laptop, youcould rip the HDD out and scan it in a fast PC

It is a clean install of XP Home but my dad will be using it to browse internet and download email etc so i need an AV to run on the laptop itself.
A free firewall would help but it doesn't stop viruses when my dad opens an attachment in his mail.

You could remove all email applications and IE in order to prevent him getting viruses?

UrBaN wrote:You could remove all email applications and IE in order to prevent him getting viruses?

As Llama alliance member i will refrain from 'ing you

As i said,

Screeper wrote:my dad will be using it to browse internet and download email

Cutting him off from email and internet would defeat the object of the exercise in this case
He needs his email/internet..

Yes, but he wouldn't get any viruses...cheaper than getting him an AV.

Just a thought...

oooo ... can we email him links to game crack sites?

Stuart

i remain convinced this is an issue more with the OS than anything else, but have you given antivir a bash?, (avira is still more of a resource hog than nod, though....)

rustypup, Actually it is an issue with the hardware - it barely meets minimum (read: suicidal) spces for XP. An AV on top of that is asking for trouble.

Am downloading Antivir atm. Hope springs eternal...

My own laptop is getting pretty long in the tooth now (1.5GHZ Asus L4R, 512MB RAM), and in my own quest for a lean AV, I've been using avast for a while. IDK if it'll be quite resource friendly enough for the specs you describe, since mine does occasionally labour a bit, but it's definitely much friendlier than AVG used to be. http://www.avast.com/

I have been advised more than a few times that kaspersky is the leanest of AV's, but since it's pay-to-play, I've not tried it myself.

Honestly though, with the specs you describe, I have to second Rusty's *nix advice. You could try installing Xandros/Freespire, which is really Windows-friendly. I've not tried them myself, being quite happy with Ubuntu and Fedora, but I've often heard it said that Xandros is the best distro for newbies coming from WinXP.

If you're feeling more adventurous, you could also have a look at this:

http://wskills.blogspot.com/2006/12/lin ... ws-xp.html

Mina.

Firstly turn all the graphical things in xp down (ie: get rid of the fancy blue task bar and such). Throwing more ram into the system will do it good, and you can probably find some for around a R100.

I was running a laptop with similar specs for a long time and I used symantec antivirus (not Norten). It worked very well for me and is not a resource hog at all

norton claims to be a lot less resource hungry these days... maybe you could test the theory for us