Performance improvements between anti-virus s/w vendors

Just a note to comment on a performance advantage I've found between rival anti-virus software packages, and to see if anyone else has found the same.

I have a 1Gb XP A150, fairly standard, no mods or upgrades, and I've never flashed the BIOS. I use Nero6 for both it's 'wave' file editor sound recording etc [long term project to digitise all my vinyl to mp3], along with a dvd-rw drive salvaged from an old laptop and a £10 adaptor/casing from HK. VLC & REAL s/w for dvd and mp4 film playing without hops, skips or jumping at all. Firefox web-browsing is also much better/faster than IE7 on this netbook too, as IE7 always seems to not display pages correctly or scale them properly. I also tend to try and run software that will have the least impact on resources.

I've found the following improvements on performance (1) Using an SD card [the faster the better] in the 'expansion slot' bottom left of keyboard, as opposed to the back right SD slot, and configuring the system to use that SD card as a 'D: drive', and then designating it as the main 'swap' file, speeds up things a little bit, (2) originally using Kaspersky v7 as a trial anti-virus software, I found the system often paused or did not respond to clicks/selections for up to 5 seconds before continuing to run, very frustrating if you are expecting something to happen immediately and it doesn't. However, when that trial ended I switched to Avira's free personal anti-virus v9 solution, after a review in PCPro. This improved things no end, and the whole system is now much more responsive than before. Clicked items happen straight away rather than pausing as before. On reflection, it seems Avira have taken the effort to 'optimise' their software for Netbook use, and I for one can vouch that it works.

 

Just as another data point and absolutely no comment on which is better. I have an SD card installed in the left slot with 3 gig allocated using eboostr and free avast security. A considerable improvement over the "stock" setup.

 

Although not currently, I was using a 150x 4Gb SD card with 2Gb designated as a swap file. Only reason for that was I read somewhere once that the ratio of RAM installed to swap file size had an effect, not sure what though.

Seems like you have found similar enhancements to myself. Been reading through the forum and seen various comments on 'boost' products, though they seem to be with respect to Vista and W7 not XP. Where does 'eboostr' come from then, as I might give it a try out if it works for XP? I always like to isolate individual improvements before lumping them together, so should be interesting.

 

Avira has always been one of the "lightweight" but very very good performing antivirus app out there...And is free. It has been like this even before these netbooks came into play. So Avira did not optimize the AV for netbooks... they just did a very good job in optimizing it in general.

Eboostr is XP's equivalent to readyboost in Vista and Win7. The latest versions add even more functions.

 

http://www.eboostr.com/

Try it for free.
Interestingly, I am going to drop the cache allocation to 2 gig as eboostr seems want nothing to do with more than 2 and stops the allocation at 75% at of the current 3 gigs.

 

The best performance you're going to get is not using an antivirus. Just backup your hdd and restore your computer when you have a virus. It takes ten minutes, but you save all of your trouble of getting more performance.

Tips on software that's light on resource:
Video player: Kmplayer + Coreavc (for Windows XP and Vista), use WMP12 in Windows 7 because it's probably the least resource intensive media player (1080P video guarenteed)
Browser: Internet Explorer 8 (lighter and faster on resource than Firefox with addons). It's also more stable due to multithreading.
Addon: Eboostr 3, readyboost

Programs to avoid:
When playing hidef content, avoid GOM player, VLC player, WMP 9, 10, 11.
When browsing with many tabs, avoid Firefox (use too much resource and the only major browser without multithreading)

Do not set pagefile to sd card because it doesn't work. It's completly useless.