I am running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and all I can say is that the virus programs I use to love just seem to have compatibility problems to some extent with Vista. Even though Vista is suposed to be more secure… who in their right mine would not want to run additional virus protection?
I have a site dealing with
FREE Computer Virus Help and Recovery - Virus Help Resource but I will be vamping up the windows vista 64-bit virus protection 10x fold.
1st. I did not see PCTools anti-virus listed in the listing of PC performance hits.
2nd. I noticed that you were using 2002 of Nortons, that is pretty old.
I use PCTools SpyWare Doctor with Norton’s anti-virus 2005 for about 2 years, then tried BitDefender. Liked BitDefender EXCEPT for the part about BD FORCING HOURLY updates with no option to change the updates to a daily update… IF BD did offer daily updates as an option, then I would use BD, as it does a pretty good job.
I also have a copy of SpyBot Search and Destroy which compliments PCTools Spyware Doctor (once in a while it will detect something that SD does not!).
I REALLY wish there was a site on the net which analysed system performance AND reliability for spyware and virus software!
Ok, well… You know, a limited account might be fine and all, but what about for people who constantly sit there and tweak? The true way to fix it is not to make a one-and-all fix, its to make it user configurable in a way that everyone can do it. Make it so there is no administrator privileges- make it so a limited-account can do anything with the entry of a password.
Oh… I forgot to mention, I run Kaspersky 6 (just the A/V) and Comodo firewall 24/7 (unless I’m playing games) and the only time my computer is unresponsive is when Kaspersky is doing a scan, which is only AFTER I got to bed… I run admin account, aswell, and I stand by it fully, because everything I do would require me to log off every 5 seconds. Uh-uh. Not happening.
Mind you my pc is decent enough to run Kaspersky, Firefox with about 10-30 tabs, Comodo, and uTorrent constantly… With no drag in performance. Or else I just set my pc up properly?
And btw… All the anti-viruses you listed there might as well BE viruses, just because they miss so many. Nod-32 and Kaspersky are the only 2 decent ones out there; even nod is going downhill however. Kaspersky 7 is the best A/V out there right now, and I’m in the process of upgrading right now. 