Everyone is always looking for ways to make their computer faster. Whether it’s linux, OSX or the ubiquitous Windows, no matter how many times you upgrade, how much more RAM you add, whatever, computing, for all its increases in speed in the past years, is still not fast enough.

It’s all crap. There are bigger things killing your computer, as some industry keeps making a product that isn’t very intelligent about its usage or methods. Read on..

Now, this was going to be a big fancy article on tweaking my current primary OS at home, Vista, but there’s a bigger problem. For better or worse the one thing that slows down my computer, eats the most resources, and causes more hair pulling moments is the virus scanner. Now you may be saying, ‘whoa now, he’s not going to say what I think he’s going to say’, but yes. Virus scanners suck. They suck hard. Whether Norton AV, Avira, AVG, whatever your choice, they suck. It’s not really their fault, they choose to scan every damn file on your computer whenever modified, created, deleted, read or written to just to make sure no little harmful bits of software floating around, hiding, waiting. Now ask yourself this: when was the last time they actually found anything?

For some of you, it might be every week; for some, once a year. But, for many of you more savvy people, you might not have seen a virus notice in *years*. A program that uses between 70-160MB of RAM and adds overhead to every file access on your computer, and it hasn’t found anything in years seems kind of ridiculous. Now, I’m not advocating irresponsible computer usage. If you can think of a time in recent memory when your virus program has found something, or work in top secret information, stop reading this right now. But, if you are cautious where you download stuff, don’t pirate software or look at a lot of porn from sketchy sites, and have a proper firewall, at least hear me out. You are a responsible computer user, and you can turn off your virus scanner’s mindless brute force destruction of your resources. It will take resolve, it might even cause ridicule from your friends, but this shit has to go.

Their tactics in finding things haven’t changed in years. Computer technology has changed drastically and there are so many better methods than brute force out there. It’s frankly inexcusable.

The first step is admitting you have a problem. My work PC takes 2 full minutes from pressing return on my login screen until I have a usable system; my home system less, but I can hear the hard drive blasting away. It’s combination of indexing services and virus ‘protection’ doing its job of course. I’m not saying to turn it off completely at first, just… turn it down a couple notches. Settings like ‘If this option is enabled, the Guard scans files before opening, reading and executing, and after writing’ should be avoided. If your AV program is worth anything, it will let you tone it down. I would really prefer a manual scan option. If I am opening some unknown archive from the internet, let me scan it first if I choose to. If I am getting something from a trusted source, or running programs I run on a daily basis, leave me the hell alone. There’s only a couple ways for something to get onto my computer, the main one being me choosing to run something, or someone ‘hacking’ into my system. Bah. If they find such a hole to do so, and are so inclined, they are probably using something completely new before any such security breach is found, and AV is going to be of no help anyway.

Spyware is another issue, but at least that is usually relegated to only scanning files going to and from your browser, and usually just a manual scan. Both are acceptable usage of my system’s resources. Scanning notepad.exe for the 50^th time today is not.

So, someone please recommend me a virus scanner that will stay the hell out of my way, and let me scan, or schedule scans in lump, and leave my day to day use alone. I’ve tried most of the ones on the market at one point or another, but I don’t feel like digging through options, when for the most part, they do not let you turn things off. I just love things like in memory scan where it is constantly running through several GB of memory and pagefile. It can’t possibly be an effective search nor a particularly performance happy one.

I guess in the end, turning off your virus scanner doesn’t mean not having one available, but just tone down the monster that is killing your computer. Stop thinking that ‘oh its windows’ which it is a lot of the time, but not always, or ‘oh its my 1 year old computer’ and ‘oh I could never turn down my AV, I neeeeeed it else my computer will explode’.

Do backups, schedule a routine full scan at whatever interval you are comfortable with, and the rest of the time, tell it to go piss off.

I welcome comments, whether you agree or think I am crazy and will get all sorts of viruses tomorrow, whatever. It hasn’t happened in the past, and yes, I’ve gone sans AV on many computers without issue (well, weekly scans, all come up empty). And by all means do keep scanning if you can think of a time in recent memory where you have seen a virus due to your shady internet existence, or friends with no sense and forwarded emails or whatever.

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