I removed AVG and installed Microsoft Security Essentials on my dads PC. He always shutsdown when done using the computer and this made everything SLOW when he turned it on. On a fresh bootup starting Firefox it would take about 10 - 15 seconds just to show the hourglass icon and Firefox would load about a minute after that to load. Once AVG was replaced with Microsoft Security Essentials Firefox was ready in about 15 seconds. The PC is a P4 2.4 celeron with 1GB of ram running Windows XP.
That seems quite weird to me. I can't imagine why MSE would cause his computer to slow down so drastically (or at all).
Are you sure there aren't any other issues with the computer?
I've installed MSE on a complete range of Windows machines, and while it's always been to replace Norton or McAfee, the computer always ran better afterwards. That doesn't mean that AVG would have improved performance even more, though. It was my prior antivirus of choice, and I had the same average performance improvement with it. My switching to MSE was more of a proactive move, because I do not like the direction Grisoft is taking their product.
Why not just uninstall all the virus-scanning software? I haven't run any on my many Windows machines in the past 15 years. Do they actually do anything? Besides make your computer slow and crash other software?
It hasn't slowed my system down. Occasionally certain antivirus programs can cause problems with false-positives, but more often I've had them actively protect me from unexpected infections.
I do my best to tell my clients that antivirus programs are the least important line of defense in protection from infections, but when I tell them that the most important is their own habits, I always feel like they think I'm accusing them of something. Still, I do my best to prepare users so that they don't get infected.
Lately, that has meant that I go to great lengths to explain to them exactly what it will look when their antivirus alerts them of a problem. There are some seriously f-ed up viruses out there disguising themselves as antivirus apps. They say something like "Antivirus One has found 37 infections. Click here to run a scan and remove these infections." I've had dozens of clients click on these popups, and before you know it, the computer is completely overrun with infections, ones smart enough to prevent you from going to any antivirus websites, or even transfer antivirus install files to the system.
Long story short, on one level I agree with you Bruno. If you are sufficiently smart about using your computer, I don't think you need an active antivirus program running on your system (though it might be smart to run something like Malwarebytes on your system sometime - maybe you're infected and you don't even know it). But there is no way I'd tell the average computer user to operate their computer without an antivirus program installed, no matter how much extra business it would get me
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