What services are safe to disable?

ok, thanks for all the help guys... gonna just apologize up front if I come off as $%^&*(*&^ because that isn't my goal.. it is sometimes the result and i'm alot of fish for the pond sometimes so... anyhow...

win7 seems pretty secure, in that i haven't spotted a virus in a long time, but this thread has me thinking and i'm wondering if I should ditch comodo.

it seems to be doing a good job, i haven't caught anything bad in a very long time and i can't even say its a problem now, but maybe its part of this lag issue that has grown worse over time and is what brought me here... in its defense, comodo has been on this PC forever, i installed it as one of the first programs when i formatted this disk and hasn't been a standout issue since so, i don't really suspect it but there also isn't a scoreboard sitting here telling me what is taking so long or what isn't.

i do see comodo running sometimes but i also see the PC just go absent sometimes with my circle cursor spinning and my system idle showing 99... this whole getting constipated over some simple click or action is maddening... i try to run a process watcher and see if i can catch the bad guy, but so far nothing has stood out and i bet there are some things that can't be seen in a process explorer...

while this PC is not brand new and is 'only' a dual core, it has always been a strong workhorse and even today i can render video and freely work in the background with the cpu usage pinned deep into the 80's and 90's... i can usually work in the background on something else and system doesn't seem affected... it can be a bit slower in those times, but it's never hung or crashed, blue screened or anything ever when rendering so, just my casual grading system maybe, but that is a pretty good measure of a PC to me...

tl;dr --- start reading here ---

anyways, a better AV or no AV?? or go make a new thread for this??

running without an AV seems like suicide but, maybe I just have the wrong one.... comments?

TIA

whatttupG said:

tl;dr --- start reading here ---

anyways, a better AV or no AV?? or go make a new thread for this??

running without an AV seems like suicide but, maybe I just have the wrong one.... comments?

TIA

Click to expand...

The recent consensus on this forum seems to be pretty much "live and let live". Use what you want and accompany that with decent habits and you'll probably be in pretty good shape.

The only anti-virus that pretty consistently gets beat up is McAfee, partially because it's hell to get rid of.

Panda and Avast both have serious issues going on right now, so you can never be sure that your choice is going to remain OK.

Many here use Microsoft Security Essentials, but it regularly places low in AV tests, so is condemned for that. It is lightweight and has very very few compatibility issues on Windows. Not surprisingly, considering who builds it.

The paid programs generally expect you to give a credit card number to do the annual renewal, which is a sticking point with some.

The free programs are tending to more and more bloat and often have a "paid" version from the same company that the company is trying to push at the customers using the free version.

I do hear occasionally of people who say they haven't run AV in a decade without issues.

I'm kind of in the "do whatever you want and switch if you don't like it" camp. They are all questionable at some time in some way.

Malwarebytes is nearly always well-spoken of here, but it isn't really an AV. Unfortunately, they've gone away from a lifetime license and now use the subscription model.