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Small & Free Antivirus A Reality???

Small & Free Antivirus A Reality???

Postby martini_thief » Thu Apr 20, 2006 12:13 am

After years of free Avast! and Free AVG Antivirus, I am sick of thier seemingly large "footprint"!

Are there any rea,l freeware, low resorce antivirus apps that do at least a decent job of email scanning, on-demand scanning, and file access "on the fly" scanning?

Is this just a pipe dream? If so why?

I have 1gig of ram but I am sick of countless apps that "need" 50+MB to run effectivly.

Maybe it's my old age, but it seems to me apps used to be streamlined and clean coded to do thier job effectivly and without useing gobs of CPU & RAM!
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Postby Neuromancer » Thu Apr 20, 2006 12:58 am

Unfortunately wit hthe relatively low cost and the desire to run certain applications that need it, coders have gotten very lazy and written some very poor code.

Another sideeffect is things like Visual Studio which makes anyone able to program with no thought to code at all.

Other then that.. I do not have an answer to your question.
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Postby kd1966 » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:02 am

Unfortunately, as technology has advanced, so have the tools to undo it (Malware/Virus stuff); I've spent many years eradicating malware from users' systems and the tools to do it often come at high price and take "gobs" of CPU/RAM as well. There are individual tools, many I use can be found at Sysinternals.com to help keep malware at bay and are free. The smallest footprint for a free AV program that I've found that works in almost any Windows system is AVG. It works with most firewalls seamlessly and takes little RAM resources. If you are running 1GB RAM, perhaps you should take a look at your startup programs and running services to see where your RAM is going.
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Postby augie » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:33 am

I don't know where you get 50+MB . On my rig AVG is 27MB and ZA is 7MB, certainly way less than something like Norton. Oh, I use the free versions of both and am quite happy. That's something like %3.5 for peace of mind.

I do agree that the coders are sloppy but with 1GB rigs becoming more common, more proggies will use that. It's been going on since the beginning.
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Postby Neuromancer » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:36 am

Only 27MB? I just ran it to and if you totall up all 7 services running in taskmanager that are AVG i think even 50MB is kinda lite. I tried running but it was just way to bulky for me. But I am jaded coming from NOD32. 2 services running totalling 23MB :) (I can drop that too 20 flat if I eliminate the control panel booting at start up... but I use it a bit so I keep it running.)

Hmmm I just thought of something.. I did not have it installed long... so perhaps it was getting used to the system and shrinks as you run it more???

And yah it has been happening for a long time... (about the coders) It will hit a critical mass eventually when people will complain rather then upgrading to 8GB of RAM for their home PC...
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Postby augie » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:50 am

Hmm, I only see four processes. :unsure:

<a href="http://img111.imageshack.us/my.php?image=taskman5hw.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/1141/taskman5hw.th.jpg" border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us"></a>
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Postby Neuromancer » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:54 am

augie wrote:Hmm, I only see four processes. :unsure:

<a href="http://img111.imageshack.us/my.php?image=taskman5hw.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/1141/taskman5hw.th.jpg" border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us"></a>


Yup I see only 4 as well :) I ran 3 or 4 differnet AVs that week so I might have gotten it confused with avast...

Nice and trim though aint it :) Free and not much larger then NOD32
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Postby kd1966 » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:57 am

NOD by far is the best, but it's not free; it takes the fewest resources that I could determine using Taskmanager (Only 2 processes I think).
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Postby augie » Thu Apr 20, 2006 2:17 am

Thanks for confirming that Neuro. :yesnod:
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Postby SHK » Thu Apr 20, 2006 2:21 am

hmm... I found a Nod 32 "SCANNER" I dont remember where though. Its like 10mbs and u just run it when u want to scan. No realtime protection though.
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