January 10, 201610 yr I have a 12 year old Toshiba laptop running WinXP/SP3 that I have recently pulled off the shelf to use exclusively for downloading torrents. It has a Pentium-4 processor & 768mb ram so by today's standards, a very underpowered machine. Even so, it seems to have no problem downloading quite rapidly into it's 80gb HD. The video I download I then transfer to USB thumb drives and watch directly on TV. I never expose them to my regular computer. The Avast anti-virus previously on the machine had long expired and I was unable to load a newer version. Any suggestions for a lightweight anti-virus that runs ok on an underpowered XP machine? I'm aware of all the caveats regarding the security issues with XP, that is why I isolate the content I download but I do want to take whatever precautions I can.
January 10, 201610 yr If it's underpowered, why not look at a lightweight Linux like Puppy, the Transmission Torrent client and Clam-AV?
January 10, 201610 yr Bitdefender Antivirus Free Simple, easy, uses little memory, CPU power, etc. Supposedly using the same antivirus engine as the Bitdefender paid version but just striped of a lot of bells and whistles in the paid version. I run it on a 9 year old Toshiba Celeron (1 CPU core) laptop, 2GB memory which use to run XP but I now run Win 7 on. Been running it for years without issue (or viruses) http://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html
January 10, 201610 yr The Best Free Antivirus Utilities for 2016 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388652,00.asp
January 10, 201610 yr One more website since it includes a comparison/table of which antivirus program least impacts your PC's performance. Norton took first place again, followed by Kaspersky and Bitdefender. Expect most of these are paid versions vs free versions....but since I mentioned Bitdefender Free supposedly has the same basic engine as the Bitdefender paid version I expect it similarly uses few computer resources such as CPU and memory. http://features.en.softonic.com/windows-antivirus-comparison-2015
January 10, 201610 yr Open this link. http://www.avg.com/gb-en/remove-win32-zbot Download the rmzbot.exe file onto your computer. No need to install anything, click run and it will scan your computer for viruses. It uses only the basics and is very low memory, will run on any Windows system.
January 11, 201610 yr Author Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm giving "Bitdefender" a try. I considered Linix but I'm an old dog and Linux is a new trick.
January 11, 201610 yr Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm giving "Bitdefender" a try. I considered Linix but I'm an old dog and Linux is a new trick. Straight from the mouth of babes.... "Bitdefender is good, less one thing : it uses almost 200MB of memory - at idle." The PC Mag has been around a longgggggg time and is much more reliable than the Sonic site which, is full of popups, advertisement. One of the most important features of AV software is its effect on a computer. If you have XP, it will be massively effected i.e. poor performance with such a memory hog like BD. Go back to the PC mag reviews and read them again Even the basic microsoft ware will work also.
January 11, 201610 yr Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm giving "Bitdefender" a try. I considered Linix but I'm an old dog and Linux is a new trick. Straight from the mouth of babes.... "Bitdefender is good, less one thing : it uses almost 200MB of memory - at idle." The PC Mag has been around a longgggggg time and is much more reliable than the Sonic site which, is full of popups, advertisement. One of the most important features of AV software is its effect on a computer. If you have XP, it will be massively effected i.e. poor performance with such a memory hog like BD. Go back to the PC mag reviews and read them again Even the basic microsoft ware will work also. Not sure which article you saw that in...maybe that's the paid version of Bitdefender with all the bells and whistles. Anyway, I fired up my Win 7 Celeron machine with 2GB ram (only 1.5GB actually available), opened up Windows Task Manager to see how much memory different programs were using and Bitdefender Free while active was only using in the 1.2MB to 6MB range as I watched it over several minutes....when I took below snapshot it was using around 4.7MB...nit-noy. Bitdefender Free is indeed very light on resources used.
January 11, 201610 yr Nice to know about the true BD usage and that's good for the OP as his is an XP machine.
January 11, 201610 yr Nice to know about the true BD usage and that's good for the OP as his is an XP machine. I have avira and if I look at Task Manager it shows about 22K BUT...when I reinstalled XP, I monitored Page file usage and from when I installed avira , it showed about 200MB more (allways). So just looking at Task Manager's Memory use , is not that accurate to see the real inpact of AV software.
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