AntiVirus Software

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Does anyone here forego antivirus software? I just went through a horror show routine where after logging onto my machine here Monday, I found that my browser (Chrome) wouldn't load pages and would cause a general overall system bogdown when it was launched. IE operated at about 50%. Everything else in the system was basically unaffected. Assuming I had gotten a virus somehow (even though everything was fine last Friday), I tried to run a virus scan, but AVG Free wouldn't launch right either. (It would hang trying to update itself.) I did get it to run command-line style in Safe Mode - no viruses found.

Still thinking I must have a virus, I downloaded AVG's 'Rescue CD' software, which runs at bootup and precedes the loading of the OS. No viruses found. Malwarebytes found no malware. All this took hours and hours.

Further investigation revealed that Automatic Updates were hanging on download for some reason. Eventually I uninstalled AVG Free, disabled automatic updates (getting it to stop trying to download despite this is trickier than it sounds), downloaded an updated version of Google Drive (the old version just randomly started shouted at me for using an 'outdated' version and did nothing else to help, thanks Google), and then magically Chrome started working again (even faster than before), and everything is back to normal. ATM I have automatic updates entirely disabled and no antivirus software running. My Windows firewall is still enabled.

I'm not the sort to download and run mysterious .zip attachments in e-mails from unknown persons, nor do I surf shady websites. And AV software seems to carry a huge overhead anymore. (If you look at your system processes, you'll see that it's consuming the lion's share of your resources at any given time.)

Do I really need AV software at all? Also I'm on WinXP, and support for that is going to end in April anyway.

 

To be or not to be.

I use Avira for our everyday PC (XP). Works supposedly.
Gaming Rig (W7) has no additional protection-software whatsoever.

Both get scrubbed once a year. (format c: )

 

Ha - I tried that exact same thing. Ditto. The updater/server thing sounds right because there was a pretty constant ping being attempted all the while. (I just mean you'd see the hourglass pop up every three seconds then go away but nothing would ever happen.) Also update.exe kept popping up in processes and then going away again.

Thanks for the info, guys.

 

I too had the issue since the end of October, and it seemed to get even worse in November. It affected both my old XP machine and XP mode on Windows 7.

I'm convinced by the fact that it hasn't been fixed in two months that it's deliberate sabotage to encourage people to buy Windows 8 (32-bit).
They can say "That old thing running XP? Perhaps if you upgrade your OS it'll run faster".

If anybody has a solution that actually works, I'm interested. All I've seen is the IE update thing, and it didn't work.

 

Well disabling automatic updates restored everything to normal for me. Auto updates are meh anyway - you can still get them manually.

 

The problem is that the manual way is also glitched out for me. It takes hours, and when I botched XP mode, It STILL hadn't come up with a list of updates when I left the computer on overnight.

That is, when I choose "Windows Update" from the Start menu.