Work PC (XP) Faster than Home Desktop (Win 7 x64)

severedsolo said:

What i disagree with is you advising the OP to do the same. its just irresponsible advice IMO

good point.. if you're going to do anything random on the internet, by all means get a good internet security suite. CIS is by far the best of the free apps simply because it's configurable, light on the system and stops most of the malware out there before it even gets a start

I've never really felt that any of the AV's that I've run over the years have resulted in slowing down my PC to the point where I really notice it.

Never had a system running vista and norton internet security or McAfee (circa 2006 or 2007) with a celeron cpu and only 1 GB of RAM?

Thanks a lot for the suggestions.

I was OK with the boot time, that is I don't mind a bunch of programmes launching at start.

I got rid of Malwarebytes and Spybot and it is a lot faster! Starting apps is now instantaneous. I guess it was the ASW that was slowing down my PC.

madtownidiot said:

severedsolo said:

and how do you know you don't have a virus? for all you know you could have spyware sending all sorts of information back about you and you will never know... not all malware makes its presence felt

lol.. I knew someone would make a comment of that nature. It's a personal preference. If one's there and I don't notice it via a slowdown of my system or unauthorized internet connection (I do have a firewall which tells me which apps are connected to which IP addresses), I don't care. Viruses and spyware are nowhere near as prevalent as all the AV software manufacturers would have you believe. In the past 6 months I've fixed more than 100 infected computers, and all but one were infected because the user was an idiot.. porn, attachments to spam email, pirated software downloaded with limewire or uTorrent, drive-by downloads of the fake AV scam (which none of the free AVs or anti-malware apps seem to catch anyway) are the majority of the problem and completely avoidable if a little common sense is used. A fast system is more important to me than security, because I use my computer to fix others, and as a selling point for talking people into upgrading their systems. It takes me less than half an hour to reimage my HDDs... so why should I bother? I do recommend Comodo Internet Security if one has to have an AV. I use their firewall and any computer I set up for a customer gets CIS installed shortly after I install the OS

I personally like CIS too and used to use it for several years. But since the last year or so it was giving too many false alerts. I found MSE a lot better. MSE is a lot lighter than CIS too. And if user account control is kept activated then I dont think there is need of any extra firewall. Rest MSE takes care of the rest and Windows 7 is a lot more secure than the previous versions from what I have seen till now.

I also advise people to use noscript addon if they use firefox.