Smallest Footprint in AntiVirus?

[scabbo]

Hello All - I am wondering what product to use to protect an OLD computer- ie 200mhz win 95 etc. The idea being i would like to try to minimize system resources.

How is AVG on system resources?

I have Norton 2002 and 2003 so that is a possibility also but they seem to hog resources.

Any thoughts very welcome :)

Thanks!

Be safe.

[scabbo]

NE1?

[Norm]

AVG has a small footprint, and it's free.

[YeOldeStonecat]

What will be tough is, over the past couple of years, especially the past 2-3 years, antivirus software has evolved (out of need) to be come rather system intensive.....really scrubbing hard in the real time file protection area. It has had to...because of how today's virus's spread across networks, etc. Gone are the days of say back in Win95....when all you pretty much had to do was scan at bootup, or scan when prompted. Now it's all about real time file protection, POP3 mail port scanning, IM port scanning, etc.

Each year antivirus software has to become more system intensive....it's at the point when it's pretty much prohibitive to run it on anything below a midrange PII with at least 64 megs of RAM. Add to that, software such as NAV 2002/3 aren't a possibility, they won't even intall on Win95...you need 98 or higher.

I tried AVG once, many here seem to like it. I use Symantec's Corporate Edition at home...very small footprint, although their latest, 8.0, won't run on 95....can only go as high as 7.6.

[scabbo]

Thx YoS.

I guess at this point my thoughts are, better something than nothing. I could not agree more with your points about the state of AV and where it is going/needs to go to accomplish it job.

That said - should I pull out an old copy of NAV 4.0 or 3.0 and install it - wonder if I can even updatee the sig files?

I was hoping to run one of the newer AV programs that would not draw "as much" systems resources.

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'd probably chase down AVG and try that, wouldn't go as far back as NAV 4 or something, 2001 was really good and ran on 95.