Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Holy $DEITY!
those programs must eat up 95% of your CPU cycles and slow down any disk activity tenfold.
Have you considered running on Linux? At least for browsing? At least from a virtual machine?
Give Mint Linux a try. Works nicely out of the box and if something screws it anyway, you simply reinstall, leaving your Windows partition untouched.
There *is* some learning curve, but you seem to be experienced veteran ...
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No, they hardly impact my CPU cycles. Task Manager usually shows my processor being idle 94-97% of the time. I chose them because a) they all have a small footprint on the computer, b) they do their jobs very well, and c) they all play nice with one another and most importantly, with my computer.
I'm running Vista and its own processes are the things that tend to hog the CPU.
Windows Error Reporting, for example, hogs about 60% for an extended period of time.
I know general information about Linux, but have never seriously considered using it. I bookmarked that information about Mint, though - thanks for mentioning it. I had never heard of that version before. One of these days maybe I'll look into Linux more.
Quote:
By DMcCunney
You are going through far more trouble than I do.
I use Symantec Corporate for A/V. (I won't touch the Norton consumer version - too many "Does not play well with others" issues.) It never finds anything. (The only things it has found recently have been falso positives in some ancient MS-DOS apps I've had sine the 80's.)
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Actually, it's not much trouble at all. The programs are light and they all deal with specific aspects of security that I'm concerned with, given my computer usage. They merely back up common sense behavior on my part and cover any moments of inattention.
I've always preferred the layered approach to security on Windows; it has served me well over the years.
I dumped Norton back around 2002, IIRC, because of the problems it was causing. I came back in 2009 when they completely revamped the software and I haven't had any problems with it. It turns up the nasties it should, and has been running well with my other software. It has an extremely low false positive rate.
I use a router, too. I keep Windows fully patched but I have WU notify me, not auto-update. I usually wait a few days after Patch Tuesday and check a couple of forums to see if the updates broke anything before I apply them.