It's been five years since the last virus infected me, and it was by my own stupidity. At that time I used Norton, and after that I picked the Symantec cooporate antivirus and was kinda happy with it, but even though it uses very fewer system resources I never liked to have something running on the background all the time using cpu, but even so I left it there.
Then some time ago I "upgraded" to a newer version of Symantec just to find out it uses more resources than the previous version and increases boot time by 20 secs at least, so I decided to give NOD32 a try. It was amazingly faster than Symantec, but then I was shocked to see that when I downloaded some files, and after they got to 100% completed, NOD32 would scan em all over, using 100% of my CPU, and since some stuff were large files, it would take several minutes for each of em, rendering the computer useless for other stuff, and then when I would extract these archives, it would scan them AGAIN!. But it was "ok" then, I can live with it. Few days after using it I found out a software I used to use for more than a year stopped working, and I nailed it to be NOD's fault.
I got really frustrated then, and uninstalled NOD32. Its been months since I did that, and I'm reluctant to use an antivirus again. You ask why? I tell you why....
It's like I got a new computer ever since I got rid of antiviruses! It's so much faster, the system feels very responsive, and now WinXP boots in less than 10 seconds and memory usage with some other apps running after boot-up is 120MBs... Then I realized, that for the past five years nothing infected me, nothing even tried to get past the antivirus. I felt that there was simply no reason at all to keep using these system hogs anymore.
Then every time I read stories about the newer Norton, McAFee stuff, and after reading that post about these two companies bitching about Microsoft not allowing them access to Vista's kernel, I realized that these same guys became the evil they swore to defeat. Every new antivirus program uses more and more system resources, takes control of stuff they were not supposed to, it's like I've installed malware and PAID FOR IT .
Then some time ago I "upgraded" to a newer version of Symantec just to find out it uses more resources than the previous version and increases boot time by 20 secs at least, so I decided to give NOD32 a try. It was amazingly faster than Symantec, but then I was shocked to see that when I downloaded some files, and after they got to 100% completed, NOD32 would scan em all over, using 100% of my CPU, and since some stuff were large files, it would take several minutes for each of em, rendering the computer useless for other stuff, and then when I would extract these archives, it would scan them AGAIN!. But it was "ok" then, I can live with it. Few days after using it I found out a software I used to use for more than a year stopped working, and I nailed it to be NOD's fault.
I got really frustrated then, and uninstalled NOD32. Its been months since I did that, and I'm reluctant to use an antivirus again. You ask why? I tell you why....
It's like I got a new computer ever since I got rid of antiviruses! It's so much faster, the system feels very responsive, and now WinXP boots in less than 10 seconds and memory usage with some other apps running after boot-up is 120MBs... Then I realized, that for the past five years nothing infected me, nothing even tried to get past the antivirus. I felt that there was simply no reason at all to keep using these system hogs anymore.
Then every time I read stories about the newer Norton, McAFee stuff, and after reading that post about these two companies bitching about Microsoft not allowing them access to Vista's kernel, I realized that these same guys became the evil they swore to defeat. Every new antivirus program uses more and more system resources, takes control of stuff they were not supposed to, it's like I've installed malware and PAID FOR IT .