Ask Slashdot: Light-Footprint Antivirus For Windows XP? 294
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.)"
Hah (Score:5, Funny)
That's what they tell you, eh?
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The rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) has more than doubled among middle-aged adults and the elderly over the last decade... [webmd.com].
It's actually a growing* problem in retirement homes.
*n.p.i.
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There is a difference between IRL and surfing activity.
Perhaps. But the null hypothesis should be that older people are not different than younger people. Evidence could be presented that older people don't enjoy online porn.
Ask somebody who does tech support and system recovery how 'clean' the retirees' hard drives are.
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Every generation thinks they invented sex.
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Not for *THIS* community. This is slashdot here we are talking about after all... :P
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Whilst this might have been meant as a joke, I think the OP should take it into serious consideration!
all sites are dirty sites (Score:5, Insightful)
Ad networks/common popular websites have been compromised repeatedly in the past and will be compromised repeatedly in the future. All sites could be considered "dirty sites".
Re:all sites are dirty sites (Score:4, Informative)
Ad networks/common popular websites have been compromised repeatedly in the past and will be compromised repeatedly in the future. All sites could be considered "dirty sites".
This is totally true, but not even the whole story; a site need not be compromised to serve up malware. For a while, Foreign Policy's website was serving up malware once in a while through one of the advertising networks. Google released a comprehensive study of drive-by malware attacks that explicitly stated that the nature of content a person looked at was no longer germane to their safety from such attacks.
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No such animal (Score:5, 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.
AVG (Score:2)
I would also like to vouch for AVG being lightweight. I run it on all my machines, including a 7-year-old XP box.
Microsoft Security Essentials (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.
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Re:Microsoft Security Essentials (Score:4, Interesting)
Will it still be available for XP after 8th April 2014?
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This was my first thought, as well.
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http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/RAP/RAP-quadrant-Oct12-Apr13-12.jpg [virusbtn.com]
There is a chart of recent AV comparative effectiveness tests done by independent labs. Microsoft scored somewhere around 75% effectiveness for "Proactive" (real-time) protection. The best one on that chart for free appears to be Avira.
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Obligatory Linux evangelism (Score:5, Insightful)
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A very real and practical solution to be considered.
I find the biggest challenge is user expectation. When you say the word "Linux", many assume it's hard, weird or too different. If you can get past that and folks actually try it, they discover - to their delight - it's easy to use, intuitive and more importantly robust. At that point, the challenge is getting them to let go so someone else can have a run at it.
Re:Obligatory Linux evangelism (Score:5, Funny)
When you say the word "Linux", many assume it's hard, weird or too different.
It's a retirement community; when you say the word "Computer", many assume it's hard, weird or too different.
Re:Obligatory Linux evangelism (Score:4, Insightful)
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No risk of viruses, breaking something, no running gedit by mistake. Just turn it on, and the internet is there.
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I do not want to learn nor should have to learn.
People actually feel comfortable saying shit like this openly, and yet we wonder why the world is turning to crap......
Re: fix your own stuff (Score:2)
Learn to do everything for yourself and you free yourself from dependency on people you may or may not be able to trust.
BTW, changing your engine timing is really easy.
Re:Obligatory Linux evangelism (Score:4, Insightful)
This.
A simple sylogism:
Any antivirus solution worth its salt will put a hook in the file open system call to scan each file as it is accessed.
Regardless of the footprint and efficiency of the program, anything that runs each accessed file through an additional filter will incur a significant performance hit.
Therefore, any antivirus solution worth its salt will incur a significant performance hit.
The solution is not to install an antivirus program. Ways to deal with potential virus infestations: (1) run with adblockers, noscript, and perfectly strict browsing discipline, or (2) don't use a virus-prone system, or (3) something else?
I do (1) and (2). What will do you?
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Gee, I don't know, does it work on a "Centron"? :)
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Elderly folks are going to be more likely to need to use the Windows-only coupon printing software some coupon sites require, and boy will they be confused when they click the link, and their downloaded exe doesn't print out their coupons for them.
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That downloaded .exe is probably one of the sources of their malware woes - anything which requires you to download and run native code is dodgy as hell.
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No, they're actually legit. They want to ensure you only print one copy of each, and local, invasive software is the only way to do it.
I don't like it, but it's reality.
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And do they really need XP? After all, XP is expiring in under 9 months, so the clock is seriously ticking. Spending any time on the administration of an XP network is lost love.
If you want to "work" with 512 MB of RAM, you have to move to Linux, and a very light version of Linux, too.
On the other hand you could get rid of that junk and get a bunch of second hand PCs with Core 2 Duo CPUs and 2 GB of RAM for next to no money. They will happily run Windows 7 or Windows 8 with light applications. With 4 GB of
Avira? (Score:5, Informative)
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Add me to the list for advocating Avira. Been using them since 2007.
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I used it for years until it started pestering me with nag screens all over the place, filling my screen with maximized pop-ups up to 6 times a day, let alone smaller notifications even more often. At least with Avast I can set the antivirus to Silent/Gaming mode and it's hush-hush.
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When I was using the free edition, I blocked the nag screen using local policy...
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Seems a reasonable bet... http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/379933/avira-free-antivirus-13 [pcpro.co.uk]
I agree Avira is good, I've used it even way back on windows 95/98/98SE. The current versions do tend to spam you with pop-ups trying to get you to buy the full product, but even so only a couple of times a day. Not quite to the annoying enough to switch to something else stage, but still it is annoying. I totally recommend buying it just to support them, and help get rid of the pop ups. I used to recommend bitdefender when they allowed you to buy multiple year subscriptions, but not so much anymore.
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Avira is good, I use it on many machines and I've never known it to be a resource hog. It does only 2 annoying things:
1. Pops up a big message every day asking you to upgrade
2. Blocks access to autorun.inf which is a good or bad thing depending on what you're trying to do.
IIRC on XP it requires you to upgrade to XP Service Pack 3, which you should be anyway but may be a factor in your decision.
MSE (Score:3)
Microsoft Security Essentials (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using it for the last 3 years on XP and now 7, very lightweight. No virus or adware problem (for now). From time to time I also scan my computer with adaware and spybot.
MSE (Score:4, Insightful)
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> but MSE has a light effect on my Windows partition
Another vote that MSE is good enough - not bloated, doesn't bog the machine down like Norton / McAffe. However you really need a multi-pronged solution for security:
* Firewall - both Hardware & Software
* Hosts Blocking - http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt [mvps.org]
* Anti-Virus (real-time) - MSE
* Anti-Cookies: Spybot Search N Destroy, Adaware
> use XP with NO virus protection for a month, visit the same websites these people visit, use a modern web brows
Re:Running barefoot (Score:2)
They all seem to kill performance (Score:4, Insightful)
End Of Life (Score:5, Informative)
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Right. Giving an oldster an XP machine today is equivalent to giving them a car with some bearings that are starting to go.
Mint requires a 600MHz CPU and half a gig of RAM. That would be more kind. If they can afford to buy software they can afford a new cheap laptop, so that's not the issue here.
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My wife is a complete Luddite. Hates computers. She's a professional violinist and is most comfortable with 19th century technology. Ever look at a violin up close? It's a flimsy box of wood. You tune it by twisting a wooden peg. The thing hasn't even got frets!
I have her on an Ubuntu box. She runs Chrome and Thunderbird to read e-mail. She sometimes will look
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And the lack of Adobe Flash will surely go down very well with them!
Don't be silly, Flash has been available for linux for years.
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Yes, implemented in such a half-assed way that it's almost unusable.
eh? I've been using it for years without issue. I wish it would die too, but in the meantime, I run the Adobe repo.
Microsoft Security Essentials (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I know... it failed certification. But often what is used in certification is proof-of-concept or old and very rare samples that may not be "in the wild". It deliberately doesn't detect them to have a lighter footprint and be easier on resources. I use it on 1 GHz machines with 512MB of RAM with no noticeable slowdown. It doesn't miss the stuff that you're actually going to be at risk of getting infected with, in my experience.
You didn't state the OS you were asking about, but IIRC Avast is Windows-only. MSE may fit your requirements.
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I can't believe I posted "You didn't state the OS you were asking about" when it was in the title. This is what I get for posting before I've had my caffeine. :^p
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Centron? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sempron, Celeron?
And if you have only 512 MB of RAM, you don't have an older machine-- you have an OLD machine!
who wrote this? A Centron? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about naming your celeron correctly, adding 512MB of DDR1 for about $4, and dropping in a socket 478 Pentium 2.8Ghz for about $9. That costs less than an antivirus license. Then keep Avast, since it's the best speed vs detection.
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http://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-20-Tested-Samsung-DDR2-512MB-PC2-5300-667MHz-Desktop-Memory-/330957821186?pt=US_Memory_RAM_&hash=item4d0e9f9502 [ebay.com]
and 100 sticks of 512MB DDR1 for $150
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-100-512MB-DDR-NON-ECC-MAJOR-OEM-2100-2700-3200-/3 [ebay.com]
Sidestep the problem (Score:4, Informative)
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That's a very interesting perspective on it. I like that.
McAfee (Score:2)
John McAfee himself strongly recomends it, says it's like having a Bangkok prostitute do your taxes while you fuck your accountant:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/21/quotw_ending_june_21/ [theregister.co.uk]
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"I want an elephant the size of a mouse, please" (Score:5, Insightful)
"I want an elephant the size of a mouse, please"
Antivirus software sniffs the butt of ever filesystem write operation, as well as sniffing the but of every executable image load, as well as every browser plugin load; it also scans the contents of inbound network data, since it could have a known payload using an unknown zero day in the program requesting the data from the Internet.
Most of the code could be made significantly less overhead, but we are talking reducing it from elephant sized to water buffalo sized, rather than reducing it to mouse size. For example, if instead of checking the whole file when every write occurs, it could prevent the file being opened again until a scan-on-close occurred. Both Outlook and IE would hate that, and any browser that didn't operate "stage then interpret" would still have to be byte-stream interposed. As another example, it could decide to not react to every FS event; MacOS has this capability, since it integrates a mandator access controls (MAC) capability, but many OSs do not. And even on MacOS, most AV vendors don't take advantage of this, since it messes with their ability to use the same event streaming model as on their other platforms.
So: no such animal exists, if you want it to also be effective.
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If we're talking sniffing butts, I would be happy if it were dog sized instead of elephant sized.
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I dunno, dogs are carnivores and their shit really stinks. Elephants are herbivores, I'd imagine their dung smells no worse than horseshit looking at it's composition.
Bitdefender (Score:3)
I cannot recommend Bitdefender enough.
You might just want to suggest a memory upgrade (Score:2)
1gb memory stick for that computer is $12 on amazon. XP on 1.5 gb will run avast or mse just fine.
Old dogs can learn new tricks. (Score:2)
I moved grandmother from Outlook/Word on a 486 to Gmail and Docs on a 2ghz athlon and she adapted fine. She is 92.
"Dirty Sites" not the problem (Score:2)
At one time, long ago, it was most often the sites themselves which were hacked, hijacked and made to serve up malware. But lately, the methods have become more sophisicated. Ad servers are more often targeted and those servers are accessed by requests delivered by a wide range of sites out there. The thing about his is that the original site which might be blamed for the malware, would be uncompromised. The ad servers seem to take a lot longer to detect such compromise.
If someone is interested in setti
Panda Cloud (Score:2, Informative)
I think it will still work under XP. After the initial scan it should be pretty light on local resources.
None (Score:2)
None. Just don't use Outlook and IE. And teach the users not to click on anything they don't know. Works much better than antivirus programs which are viruses in themselves. They make your computer feverish and sluggish...
Not a joke (Score:3)
Webroot (Score:2)
Knoppix (Score:2)
http://knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix701-en.html [knopper.net]
Increase the ram (Score:2)
You are infinitely better off just trying to source some old memory chips from someone and upgrading the boxes. My parents had a perfectly good P4, but it ran like molasses, even after I disabled everything I could disable.
The problem is that modern problems are flat out memory hogs. Just running MS-Word and a web browser at the same time will suck up all the ram on the machine. You reach a point where you just have to say, "It's not worth my time struggling to make this work."
My company was sitting on a
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You might stumble on machines with only two ram slots though. If it's two SDRAM slots, the situation sucks (even with four SDRAM slots on a really old machine with shenanigans about density/sides). Two ddr1 slots, it might suck as well, 1 GB sticks cost money, 512MB sticks are plentiful and free.. if you have them. And tested them all with memtest86
If upgrading memory gets not very practical, maybe you should get new hardware altogether.
An option would be a motherboard like Gigabyte GA-C847N : no need to ju
Microsoft Security Essentials (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, seriously. It's lightweight, it's free, it's integrated into Windows Update so it's really easy to get updates, and best of all it doesn't continually hassle you and go LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! the way most of the other antivirus apps do. It just sits in your icon bar and does its job.
It's not brilliant, security-wise --- it's merely adequate --- but if you want something that hides itself away and gets on with things with a minimum of user panic, it's definitely the way to go.
Everything has an end of life (Score:2)
Everything has an end of life, including computer hardware. It's time to put those creaky ancient machines out to pasture.
LINUX (Score:2)
I'm not trolling. Perhaps the best A/V for the clueless grandparent user is Linux.
A modern Linux with the LXDE window manager configured to look like/work like a Windows desktop using Firefox to web surf and access Gmail plus whatever the latest iteration of LibreOffice is for word processing has been a winner for me in similar circumstances. The biggest problem is when they have some obscure win32 app they are tethered to. In those cases, spend the only $$ you need to spend and use Crossover.
I usually try
Why not replace systems with some cheap ChromeOS? (Score:2)
How many systems are you talking about? If it's not a lot, I would recommend to the proprietors that they just replace the whole lot of them with cheap ChromeOS systems ($250 each if you go for the current Samsungs). That way, you won't be worrying too much about virii, the old folks can still surf matlock.com and you come out looking like a genius.
Antivirus is entirely irrelevant with XP's EOL (Score:2)
Really you have to let it go. You can spend days and weeks setting up antiviruses, wasting your time scanning disks, reinstalling Windows XP from scratch to get rid of infections etc. and by April all your work will have gone to waste.
It's hopeless. You may consider an upgrade to Windows 7 32bit for computer that have 1GB memory or more (that people will have to pay of their own pockets), maybe upgrading the memory is an option in some case, as well as a new HDD or even (better) an SSD. I'd say a old P4 bas
Avast! (Score:3)
Avast is lightweight... I am ruining it right now on 450mhz pentium 2 with 384mb of ram. Avast is the only free av that didn't slow this machine down.
additional junk (Score:3)
Just remember if you install some of those AV programs they will try and install a toolbar and crap when they ask to update themselves in the future. Do you want them to install new version of program or ask for help when it asks?
I think it was AVG that got dumped when i eventually missed unchecking the box once on a machine and got a new search provider and other stupid shit :/
MSE is not so hot but it doesn't play silly games either
Re:Clamwin (Score:5, Insightful)
ClamWin is "light footprint" because it's no footprint. It has no on-access scanning, which for most people is indistinguishable from not having antivirus installed.
Re:Clamwin (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. Firefox + fireclam addon. Thunderbird + clamdrib (tho you have to work to find it)
That's not on-access, that's on-access-through-a-specific-application.
Re:Clamwin (Score:4, Funny)
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http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/
Agreed. It's not an active memory scanner but it's good for when you need it to do the occasional scans of programs or program updates you download. Along with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware scanner, and finally a lightweight firewall such as Privatefirewall it does help a lot. Also, using Firefox along with Adblock Plus, Noscript, Ghostery, Cookie Controller, and Social Fixer (Facebook) you basically eliminate a good 99% of all that wonderful infested malicious code in ads on various websites since one can only
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...but it's good for when you need it to do the occasional scans of programs or program updates you download...
Once upon a time we used Clam for an email scanner on our inbound mailserver. It was totally insufficient -- it does not catch the majority of what's actually "in-the-wild", which is what you most need antivirus for. Nothing is bullet-proof, but Clam doesn't cut it. Not even for free.
Now, that was scanning our email. How does that differ from being used on a PC? Well, for one thing, Clam/ClamWin does not have a resident-memory / on-access scanning ability, so unlike our email scanner, there is no way
Re:How does this stuff get on Slashdot? (Score:5, 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 [wikipedia.org]
As for /. letting this through... things have changed, have you been gone for the past 3 years?
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maybe have a look at this:
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/windows-xp/marapr-2013/
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Avast isn't heavy on CPU usage. It relies on fast HDD access. All antiviruses do and if it seems like they don't, they're simply not scanning as much as they should. Avast is the king resource usage vs detection rate so you should still use it.
Oh and to the couple morons above me recommending MSSE, you're completely out of touch with reality. It is the dead last worst rated antivirus in the entire world and a resource disaster. It's the last efficient scanner I've ever seen in my entire life and the disk IO is absurd.
Avast used to be good.
Then came the bloat and adverts. While the virus threat is always evolving and changing, some performance un-hancements are clearly development choices. Is there any reason, for example, to override the standard window controls with a super fancy custom rendered GUI that runs in 50x of the time of native controls? Particularly when this is a Windows application with no cross-platform needs at all? It's almost as bad as every ASUS utility GUI.
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I'm also using ESET Nod32 and find it to be lightweight compared to other scanners I use/used. It also integrates nicely into Thunderbird and hasn't missed a malicious attachment there. Only annoyance with that is that there's no option to 'repeat this action for next findings'. This sometimes results in a clickfest when one of those malware waves is in full swing. Other than that there's not much to complain.
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Why yes, I do have that URL memorized. Sigh.
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I agree, it's a great solution though you have to find an OS (linux based?) to act as the RDP thin client - with those USB, storage, printer features which aren't that trivial. You also need to pay some big $$ for the Server 2012 license, plus CAL, plus special remote use licenses which usually aren't even listed - but we can expect about $100 per thin client.
So it ain't cheap. And it's useful for a retirement establishment, not for retired people living in their own homes.
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Come to think of it, even antivirus will be unsupported. They will refuse to install, update, or enable the resident protection and at the very least prompt for an upgrade to a newer Windows version.