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.)"
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.
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.
Avira? (Score:5, Informative)
End Of Life (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory Linux evangelism (Score:2, Informative)
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: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.
Re:Hah (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Sidestep the problem (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:MSE (Score:2, Informative)
maybe have a look at this:
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/windows-xp/marapr-2013/
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.
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.