AV causing slow performance?

[wb]

I recently got a new AV, which does a good job, but I am wondering if it is taking up too much space, or hampering the speed.

I thought I had installed it a few days ago, but something went astray, and to my horror, I realised that I had been running the PC with no AV for a few days. But the PC was very fast during this period. I installed the new AV, ran all the scans, cleaned up the PC etc. but it is going slower since I installed it.

When I was installing it, a message popped up saying something like "this program runs best with X amount of space, but will still run on less." - I had just below this figure available (cant remember how much it said)

how do I check how much space it is taking up, and how can I tell if it using too much space.

Im no computer expert, so laymans terms appreciated.

Thanks

[GlosRFC]

By space...do you mean Hard Disk space or computer memory space? You can check how much of the former you have by opening My Computer, right-clicking the drive you want to examine and selecting properties.


To see how much memory it's taking up press CTRL+ALT+DEL to call up Task Manager, and go to Processes....look for the name of your AV there.

[wb]

Thanks Glos.

Not sure what the problem is. I seem to have a good bit of memory left on the local disk, so it is not that.

The pop up during installation asked about hard disk space. It said something like:

" your PC has 256mb (not sure if this is the exact figure), this program requires 280mb to run at optimum level, but will run with less"

Something like that anyway.

Thanks

[GlosRFC]

The 256mb looks like system memory or Ram - this normally comes in 256mb chunks and I suspect it's this that's slowing your PC down. You can check how much memory you have by calling up Task Manager as I suggested and then clicking on the Performance tab.

The one you're interested in is Total Physical Memory. The one that should concern you is the Available Physical Memory - I'm will to bet that this is a low figure when you have your AV and other programs running. We discussed this previously when you were enquiring about having various Office programs open. Because almost all of your Physical Memory is being used, Windows has to copy data onto your Hard Disk so it can recall it later. This is much, much slower than using the Physical Memory.

You can do a few things to try to improve matters, listed in order of which will be the most efficient:
1. Buy more RAM to increase your Physical Memory - by far the simplest solution and guaranteed to resolve your problem.
2. Change your AV to one that isn't such a memory hog.
3. Run less programs at the same time (by which I mean, every program that is probably running - check how many by looking at the number of Processes in the bottom left corner of the Task Manager window)
4. Don't run memory hogging programs while your AV is running. So when you're online don't use Office. When you're offline turn your AV off too.
5. Increase the size of your Cache

[wb]

Thanks Glos. It looks like getting more RAM is the way to go. I badly need it anyway.