question about the @ in they system tray

is there a way to stop it from spinning? reason why i ask is if it wasnt spinning wouldnt that make Avast use less memory?

Go to avast settings > Appearance > Uncheck animate icons box.

It will not make any difference to avast resource use.

oh ok, one more question, how much of a system slow down would i see running on this system

P3 933mhz
512 ram
ATI 9800 pro 128mb

thanks

Until about 4 months ago I was running avast on a >5year old Dell mahine with very similar specs to yours (P3 1GHz).

I ran, as I still do with, only 3 providers. The Standard shield, the Web shield, and the Internet Mail scanner all with sensitivity set to Normal (although I now run Internet Mail scanner on High). On that machine it made only a few percentage points difference to CPU utilization with/without avast installed.

However, I also ran with my machine with only those services and startup programs I considered essential. I honestly was not able to percieve a significant difference in the performance of the system with avast active or inactive.

One significant change I did make to my system that did make a noticeable performance change was a registry update to turn off the “last accessed date” for files/folders in Win XP.

It is my impression that in threads where we have got to the root cause of performance issues the main performance hit seems to be in P2P shield. There have been intermittent problems for some folks in scanning large logging files in certain applications. A few folks have experienced performance problems when using the Thunderbird mail client, but this can usually be overcome by proper use of Thunderbird management functions.

Your system should be fine with avast, there are many people running avast on lessor systems, especially if you have the settings on Normal as Alan mentioned. However, you have any other security programs that monitor files, anti-spyware, etc. that may force avast to scan those files it check also, effectively duplicating the scan.

What other security based software, e.g. Spybot S&D (TeaTimer), AdAware (AdWatch), SpySweeper, PrevX, WinPatrol, ProcessGuard, etc. ?
What firewall do you have (some have anti-spyware extensions) ?