In my opinion, one of the reasons 1 GB has become the de facto “real world” minimum requirement for loading Windows is because after the operating system is loaded, a slew of resource hungry watch guard programs are loaded. When I say watch guard, I’m referring to antivirus, antispyware and firewall programs.
A good guideline is a single antivirus program and (up to) 2 antispyware programs should be enough. If you don’t have a hardware firewall/router, the built in Windows firewall should be adequate for most everyone.
I understand a computer needs to be protected, but a computer’s sole purpose isn’t to run monitoring programs, it is to use it for what you need. A quick way to slow down any machine is to load it up with monitoring programs which not only consume memory, but also have to give anything you want to do their seal of approval before allowing it.
For a quick example, our training machines here run Windows XP Pro on 1.5 Ghz Celerons with 512 MB of RAM with no antivirus or antispyware at all… and run faster than several production machines with twice the capatibilities running the same programs.
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also, dont overload with applications. dont install and later remove
applications too much. free applications may not be such a good deal. search reviews and pay for the best one in that catagory. free aps that I do use are; picas2, ad-aware, spybot. I get a free version of norton a/v from cable service. it works very well. avg for a free a/v is a good choice.
I am not in total agreement with this tip. Certainly, it is true you can easily overload even a high-horsepower PC with too many security programs and many people go way overboard in this area. But there are still some minimum requirements that are not addressed in this tip.
The Tip author is absolutely correct that you need a good AV program. But suggesting it is okay to use 2 Anti-spyware programs is misleading. You should only have 1 anti-spyware program “running” or “in-resident” (also called “active scanning” or “real time scanning”) at any given time. It is fine to have more AS programs installed to use for manual “on-demand” scanning, but not 2 or more “running” at once.
The Tip author is incorrect, however, to imply that you don’t need a software based firewall if you are behind a router. This is not true in most cases, except, perhaps, if your PC is behind a “corporate” (read: very expensive, professionally maintained, dedicated) firewall. The typical firewall used in home and small offices sees EVERYTHING on the “trusted” or local side of the firewall as safe data. This means that malware on an infected computer on your network (everything on your side of the router is your network) is free to seek out and infect all the other computers (especially if sharing is enabled) on your network. The only way to prevent this if your computer has a software based firewall, such as Windows Firewall, ZoneAlarm, or Comodo Firewall.
And while this tip focuses on AV and AS programs, in addition to a software based firewall, everyone should also be using a spam blocker and pop-up blocker in their browsers (or some other capable pop-up blocker) enabled.
And of course, the most important anti-malware resource is you, the user. You must “practice safe computing” – at all times – that is, you must keep your systems patched, updated, scanned and blocked always, never open attachments or downloads without scanning first, and stay away sites badguys wallow in, such as porn and p2p sites.
-b
Thanks for the additional tip about the software firewall. Any users who have more than one Windows machine behind their router may want to protect themselves this way.
If you just have a single machine behind the router, the firewall capabilities on it should be adequate.
Very,very good advise….JR