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Ask Slashdot: Light-Footprint Antivirus For Windows XP?

Posted by timothy on from the tread-lightly-stomp-hard dept.

New submitter Bauermlb writes "I service computers for retired folks in my community, often older machines with modest speed (2 GHz Centron) and modest memory (512 MB). Adding AVAST to one of these machines slows it to a crawl. Any recommendations for a light-duty antivirus program with a low overhead? (These people do not tend to surf 'dirty' sites.)"

5 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. No such animal by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is no such thing as a safe website. These days any site can wind up hosting malware via banner ads that inject code.

    AVG is relatively lightweight but I would suggest you test it and others on some of your target hardware.

  2. Microsoft Security Essentials by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen way better performance with it than with McAfee, Avast, etc.

    Detection benchmarks typically put it on par with the other free solutions, though it changes from month to month.

  3. Avira? by kinarduk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seems a reasonable bet... http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/379933/avira-free-antivirus-13

  4. End Of Life by kelarius · · Score: 5, Informative

    Microsoft is killing updates for XP in a little under 9 months. Get them onto linux or a new PC or it may not matter how good of an antivirus you put on there after that.

    --
    Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
  5. Re:How does this stuff get on Slashdot? by ZeroNullVoid · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think he is getting confused and meant to type Centrino which was, at sometime a marketing/branding term for an Intel Reference Design consisting of Chipset, CPU and Wifi. Either way, they wrote it wrong, but lurkers from the past would have recognized it. It was posted on a lot of laptop stickers in the same way Pentium 4, Core X, etc are.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

    As for /. letting this through... things have changed, have you been gone for the past 3 years?