I have installed MSE on a Win XP machine today. I have noticed quite a performance hit. But I am wondering if it will be caused by testing MSE on older hardware rather than operating system. All XP machines I have are keeping XP only because they are not powerful enough to run Seven. And all of them are just slow DDR, slow bus, slow one core processor. Has anyone tried MSE on an XP machine but with newer hardware? Maybe the difference lies there.
I think it's XP OS + Hardware causing the slowness. I remember reading something on Softpedia ages about about it not being optimised for XP. Nowadays not too many AV's run all that smooth on XP, however I know Panda Cloud Antivirus Free runs good on it most of the time with only a hiccup now and then when it's real-time protection is checking the Cloud.
It's probably a design decision from Microsoft. If I had to guess, I'd say they started making better use of multiple CPU cores, which means when running on older hardware the (already slow) CPU has to do significantly extra work.
I have installed MSE on a Win7 (with 1GB RAM) machine and I think it takes up about 60-70 MB in RAM. I am starting to think that it would be best to install some cloud antivirus on PCs with less than 2 GB RAM. I guess the RAM usage will be around the same for XP.
From what I remember the resources shown in Task Manager under XP go from the 50's during idle then go into the 100's of MB during scanning. Task Manager however isn't a proper way to determine how much it's actually using. There are of course big name antivirus programs (Norton, etc.,) that use way more resources in the 100's of MB's all the time in XP even when they're just sitting still during idle time with nothing to do.
I have installed AVAST on a dual-core, 512 MB RAM newly formatted XP system and it became totally irresponsive. Uninstalled it, installed MSE and it was good. I don't really care for all the bloatware in other AV programs nor whether the scan speed is state-of-the-art of not.
According to my tests, MSE would eat up about 60-80MB while AVAST was well over 150 MB+
Having so little RAM is a PITA; opening FF eats up about 200MB+ RAM with a single tab. This is not good.
The bottom line: MSE is not that bad on XP systems even if you are not as protected as with other suites. You get what you pay for.
Is it XP SP3? Because firefox doesn't support SP2 anymore
The bottom line: MSE is not that bad on XP systems
I don't have an issue with it's real-time protection in this current version since it seems like they've did something to make it not make opening folders unresponsive.
I know their Quick Scan is doing more now (it was in the previous version too) as it should because it didn't check nearly enough in earlier versions. However overall scan speed when using the Full Scan is a make it or break thing when it comes to AV's, too slow and people will complain and ditch it.
Is it XP SP3? Because firefox doesn't support SP2 anymore
Yes.
PS - You can download the offline definitions (updated once per day) to be able to install it without Internet connection. -> http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/definitions/adl.aspx
Regarding MSSE I came across this article:
Any thoughts, any one ?
I think I first came across that article months ago, via another thread on this forum.
Seems to be just another miscommunicated press release from MS.
I like at the start where it states it was once on top. A very dubious claim at best by the writer.
Personally, I've never been a fan but there are plenty who are and still swear by it. (I'm sure the forum members who use it will chime in and support that)
I like at the start where it states it was once on top.
I don't know how they can claim that, but they don't elaborate with any statistics. However I'm thinking of download numbers only, and if going by that both Avast and AVG would squash it on download quantity alone since they've had free versions for nearly a decade.
That article was posted in October and part of it was from a previous article posted elsewhere.
Some of the comments there were taken out of context and I think Microsoft has moved towards spending time sharing info and fighting baddies, than winning av contest prizes.
Also advising people to switch or at least look at other av's meant the European Monopoly Commission was less likely to fine them as they did in the 'browser choice' fiasco
Also advising people to switch or at least look at other av's meant the European Monopoly Commission was less likely to fine them as they did in the 'browser choice' fiasco
If they had been fined for protection against and removing malware that would've been a slap in the face, regardless of it being included in Win8 as Windows Defender.
Agreed. For me I still like it because of its lighter fingerprint and tidy interface. Other AV suites are bloatware to me.
Just today I've went back to using MSE. I'm going to use it as an in-between antivirus until I find a better freeware one or paid one I like.
Long story short:
Starting Tuesday afternoon (after driving back home in near blizzard conditions) my computer would only successfully get to the Windows desktop after 2-3 attempts and it kept doing this. Today I figured out via loads of troubleshooting and since my Macrium Reflect backup couldn't remedy the problem that it was Panda Cloud Antivirus doing something to the boot process that would only allow the system to successfully load randomly. What a pain to figure out!
Sometimes MSE causes CPU to go "through the roof". But there's a fix for that.
http://www.tweaking.com/articles/pages/fix_high_cpu_usage_of_microsoft_security_essentials,1.html
off topic*
unable to get to tweaking.com site at the moment.
I know. It crashed. Try it later. The info came from Facebook.
Sorry about the site going down, freaking apache has been crashing for some reason. Site is back up now :-)
And now I need to deal with apache lol
Shane