A little over a year ago I decided to do a clean install of my Windows XP laptop. Overall, I’d been pretty happy with its performance – a Compaq post HP acquisition model – but it was starting to slow down and I’d accumulated a lot of leftover bits and pieces of software I’d since uninstalled.
It was a great decision; it actually fixed a wireless problem that I’d never been able to completely solve and I immediately noticed a performance improvement. Unfortunately it was short-lived.
It took me a while, because although I was careful to track the software I installed, I couldn’t pinpoint at what point the system started to slow. One thing I did notice, however, was when I had taken it home to my folks’ place at Christmas where I used it primarily offline and hence disabled applications that might want the Internet, the system zoomed.
After a process of elimination, I figured out my anti-spyware program was not only killing my system startup, it was also slowing down my application start time. The memory footprint wasn’t enormously high, but there was significant performance difference.
I had actually paid for this software, so I was reluctant to uninstall it, forget the potential of making my computer more vulnerable. And I’d be using this software because it wasn’t as bloated as others. I looked around at freeware options, but none got good enough reviews to put on my system. Finally, I came to a conclusion. I wasn’t going to run anti-spyware software.
Gasp. I know. I’m crazy. But one thing I did realize was that in all the time I’d run anti-spyware software with real-time protection, I’d never encountered any threat notifications, and my weekly scans came up with nothing but cookies from legitimate Web sites. So either the software was no good and my system as already riddled with spyware, or I simply wasn’t encountering anything that mattered. I’ve since tried out Windows Defender for a couple of months and came to the same conclusion.
It makes me wonder if there really is much of a threat out there to a user such as myself who uses common sense when surfing the Internet. I actually don’t use wireless at home since my laptop is a desktop replacement and never gets moved and I use Firefox as my browser and clean my registry weekly.
Perhaps this decision will catch up to me. In the meantime, I’m getting great performance from a four-year old laptop.
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