Think your computer is running slow?

Then perhaps your security software is to blame. Most people will have read the stories of Norton Internet Security 2007 crippling machines but I'd not known the full extent of the problem. It's an absolute shame when you see people using McAfee or Norton to protect themselves simply because it came pre-installed on their Dell computer or they'd been told it was a must have by the helpful staff PC World. Again, profit before quality/customer satisfaction.

Trawling around for some figures I stumbled upon the blog of Jeff Atwood who has a nice article on security software and it's implications. It's amazing to see just how much these security suites actually degrade the performance of your machine:

	Percent slower
	Boot	CPU	Disk
Norton Internet Security 2006	46%	20%	2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8	7%	20%	2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007	45%	8%	1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006	2%	0%	1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS	16%	0%	992%
Norton Antivirus 2002	11%	8%	658%
Windows Live OneCare	11%	8%	512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper	6%	8%	369%
Nod32 v2.5	7%	8%	177%
avast! 4.7 Home	4%	8%	115%
Windows Defender	5%	8%	54%
Panda Antivirus 2007	20%	4%	15%
AVG 7.1 Free	15%	0%	19%

I've always liked AVG Free myself. Quite often it's picked up infections on computers that Norton has supposedly been protecting but has the added benefit of being totally free. Obviously you'd need a seperate firewall installed, but there are a couple of very good free products out there.