What Slows Down Your Windows

What Slows Down Your Windows

Results and Conclusions

Most people won't find anything too shocking here. One of the most surprising things to be gleamed from here is the blatant time and effort Symantec have gone to improve their product from the 2006 version. This won't help you if you own that version, but it should give you a good idea what to expect from Symantec in the future if you're determined to stick with their product line.

Overall

Here's the table of results for all three sections ranked by their overall performance degradation. The control times where:

Boot Time: 70 seconds
Prime: 26 seconds
FileIO: 25seconds

Boot Delay

The boot delays were quite a lot smaller than last time, likely to be attributable to VMWare having a better grasp on its file system than Virtual PC, but the same names were at the top of this test.

Prime Delay

I wasn't expecting too much of a result from here. The prime delays would have come on systems where there were applications hogging resources.

FileIO Delay

The only applications this was going to affect were the system-monitors; those applications that require 100% attention on the file system, namely the security products.

Conclusions

Well it's clear to see what sort of application has most effect on Windows. Antivirus programs tether the performance of your computer alongside that of one three years its elder. If you really need an antivirus system, make sure you follow these benchmarks but also make sure you check how good the one you're looking at really is. Nod32 gets good security reviews and seems to leave the system fairly nippy

The new version of Norton has shocked me a little. Every year since their Norton AntiVirus 2002, they've added more and more "bloat". They call them features, and looking at the box, you'd agree. Features have traditionally come at a price though. If you're scanning more things, it's going to take it more time. NIS2007 seems to do all the work of 2006 but with significantly less load on the FileIO. I'm not shouting "go out and buy it" because of the massive boot delay and there are still better products.

If you're looking for the best of the best antivirus products you should look at their detection rates. There's no point in having something, no matter how expensive, if it cannot keep you protected.