Good day, I just built a new gaming computer and I do browse for torrents, so I travel via shady sites sometimes. I’m very aware of my web presense (I have common sense). I’m an old school user and have seen my share of viruses and spyware so I know what to click on and what not to click on.
That being said I want something which works, which is low on system resources. At the moment I have Microsoft Security Essentials but I hear it’s not that good in terms of virus protection.
I want to try Avast Free but I want to set up in a way that it’s not using up useless resources. I use gmail, I use chrome, I game a lot, I download torrents.
Mainly my concern are the real time protection features. Which ones can I disable without compromising my experience too much? I mean, I wont install Mail, IM or P2P protection. But what about real time file scanning? I hear the script shield only works for IE, so using Chrome it’ll be useless right? And I hear web shield slows down browsing. Is Network shield actually worth using?
I want a minimalistic setup but still have it protect my PC. Keep in mind all the things I mentioned about my habits.
I really appreciate you guys taking the time in helping me set this up.
avast! works perfectly together with the browser google chrome. it consumes minimal computer resources. If I was in your place I would rather choose avast! and not Microsoft Security Essentials. But this is only my opinion. The choice is up to you.
With less the 6 mb ram when your pc is idle i think is the lightest av on the market. When you browse on internet it goes max up to 20 mb ram. And the webshield is not slowdown the browsing, on some page is rising on max 20% cpu wear (but that only for less then 2 sec). And trust me you will never fell that is slowdown your browsing experience. You can have all 8 shield active. Is light and fast, and with strong detection. I am a game user and is the best av for me, i use it for more the 4 years without no problem and i never felt is slowdown my pc. But hey you chose what is the best for you.
I game pretty extensively on the laptop in my signature and I leave all the Shields running without any problems or slowdowns. Avast has a silent mode that kicks in when you go full screen in a game so you will not be interrupted by any alerts or popups. MSE to me is much heavier on resources even with it’s limited feature set than Avast is with everything running. MSE also uses far more resources while scanning (much slower than Avast) and at the moment is just simply not that good. I wouldn’t trust it at all for the kind of usage you describe which by the way sounds just like mine. I also leave the P2P shield on specifically because I do use torrents from time to time. The Mail Shield may be redundant but it actually has caught 2 things that got past the scanning from my email providers. Using it is up to you. It only runs while receiving or sending mail.
All of the Avast shields are necessary in my opinion, the only things I don’t use are the browser plugins and specifically WebRep. If you don’t use the browser plugins then I would definitely leave the Network and Web Shields on. Avast is also pretty much useless without the real time scanning enabled. I have done internet speed tests with different shields or even all of them on or off and I see no differences in speed with any setup.
Not the lightest but IMO it’s actually faster than WD/MSE especially when it comes to real time scanning. Sometimes WD makes installing applications really slow (before the installer starts). Even with all the shields on it’s fast and light.
Lol…If you are any type of gamer then worrying about power is not a problem. Any gamer should have enough power in his machine to run everything and anything.
I do have enough I think i am just paranoid as my last av experiences have been heavy hogs like norton and mcafee. I only disabled browser protection, mail shield and im shield (don’t use any im and I use gmail which is not supported by mail shield anyway).
I want to disable popups and noticed that 0 is an acceptable entry. Does this mean it won’t show or it’ll stay on forever?
Thanks guys
FYI it scanned my system in 7 mins, 180gb ssd and 1tb wd black. MSE took 40 mins!!
