Question why F-secure antivirus slows computer to almost zero

[jimdagys]

Someone has a Xp computer that has a problem. The complaint was that it was very slow and sometimes locking up requiring a restart. I see it took about 1 minute for Firefox browser to come up. Also, it took about 4 minutes to install a small exe (Hotspot VPN) that should take about 20 seconds to install. In short, everything was very very slow. I tried contr>alt>del but the Task Manager wouldn't come up. Then I right clicked on the task bar and was able to get the Task Manager. There wasn't anything hogging the cpu, but I noticed the Mem usage on several processes to be quite high. A quick check on Google and I found all of these processes belong to F-secure antivirus. I then stopped these processes with the Task Manager. Now the computer runs very fast, Firefox comes up immediately and Hotspot exe installs fast in less than 20 seconds.
My question is:
1) Why does this F-secure antivirus slow the computer to almost zero?
2) Is there anything that can be done about this (besides changing the antivirus)?

[redwudz]

I haven't used that antivirus, but it's probably scanning files already stored on the computer if there is any activity with them.

If you want that level of security, then you may have to live with the slowness. Or make some adjustments in the settings to make it a bit less intrusive, while still offering decent protection. If you can't schedule it to perform full scans when the computer has low usage, I myself would replace it with something else. Scans of incoming files shouldn't take that long. I have dropped a couple of antivirus programs that did similar in the past, with endless scans that slowed my systems. They wanted to scan every file, even if it was just moved from one folder to the other with no changes made.

Malware doesn't just come out of nowhere, you have to DL or install it. That's where a antimalware program should be working. It's a bit late if it's already on your system.

I do have all my incoming files and email scanned and I do schedule regular system scans. But neither slows my system by much. I use Avast, Spyware Blaster, Spybot and Comodo firewall and haven't had any malware in quite a while. And all of the programs operate in such a way that doesn't bog down my systems.

Finally, if the computer in question is underpowered with a small amount of RAM and slow hard drives, that can contribute to the problem.

[jagabo]

How much memory did the computer have? Insufficient memory could lead to constant virtual memory swapping.

Maybe the antivirus was actively performing a system scan while you were working on it?

You may be able to reduce the level of protection the AV is using and still have good protection.

Just because the computer had antivirus software doesn't mean it couldn't have a malware infection.

[jimdagys]

Computer has 448MB of memory, 1.8Ghz AMD. The antivirus is not doing a special scan or update. It is just running in the background and the computer is unworkably slow, all the time. With the antivirus processes disabled via the Task Manager, the computer is running at lightning speed.

[Ai Haibara]

Add more RAM to the system.

The minimum recommendation for XP is 512 MB, despite the fact that (if I remember correctly) Microsoft has/had a lower minimum recommendation. Even at 512 MB, however, I've still seen it be easy for processes to bog the system down, so if you can get at least 1-2 GB to work with XP, all the better.

[JohnnyBob]

Make sure you don't have 2 antivirus softwares installed and active. That can cause the kind of slowdown you're seeing. For example you don't want to run F-secure at the same time as Windows Defender. If you're running various other anti-malware software in realtime, that might also interfere and cause slowdowns, so turn it off temporarily for testing.

[cal_tony]

I use F-secure and if I'm not mistaken the latest versions require 1gb memory as a minimum. I was using 512 mb with the older versions and all was okay. When it updated itself it just slowed down to a crawl. I added another gig of memory and it was fine again.

Tony

[jimdagys]

Sounds like a good answer.

When it updated itself it just slowed down to a crawl.

(I know that the computer ran fine with F-secure several months ago.) No problem. I'll see if I can un-install it and then change to Free Avast.