Removing Your Antivirus to Speed-Up Your Vista is a Bad Idea!

Paul Boutin at New York Times blog is seriously advising his readers to uninstall their antivirus program to gain back the speed of their computers. He wrote:

Uninstall your antivirus software. I’m serious. Symantec Norton 360 spent so much time trying to protect me from problems I’ll never have that it dragged my Toshiba’s performance to a crawl. I tried turning it off, but it kept rising from the dead. So I uninstalled it. Instant speed boost. I blame my fellow journalists for overhyping the threat of online viruses and malware. Thanks a lot, scaremongers.

Using any computer without real-time protection by anti-malware or anti-virus software is like going to a war without any weapon. The NYT blogger suggested also to install Windows Live Essential to gain back the speed of Windows. I do not see any connection on how Windows Live Essentials will speed up your computer because there's no feature in Windows Live Essentials that will optimize the system. If you will notice poor performance on your computer, you only need to do the following:

1. It could be malware or spyware that is slowing down your PC, so scan the system using an anti-malware program such as a-squared.
2. Securley clean-up the system using CCleaner
3. Defrag the system using the defrag utility in Windows or a utility such as Diskeeper or PerfectDisk.
4. If the system is still slow, remove the unnecessary Start-up applications using WinPatrol or StartUpLite
5. Use the Advanced Tools in Performance Information and Tools in Vista.
6. If your current antivirus is causing the slow performance, replace it with another malware scanner that is light to use. Try AntiVir, Avast or AVG (see the Free Antivirus Shootout article)
7. Avoid installing too many applications that you do not need. Review the applications using Add/Remove Programs or Revo Uninstaller, you may have old programs that you do not actually need. If the unnecessary programs is running a SaaS (Software as a Service), you will be able to free up not only the memory usage but harddisk space.

(14,931 pts )