The way your computer is affected by the antivirus program you choose to use depends on a lot of factors. The age of your computer, the amount of free space left on your drive and torrents running in the background can affect your system’s performance while an antivirus is doing its thing in the background.
Does Antivirus Slow Down My Computer?
Your computer can also seem slow because newer and power hungry software will eat up more power or perhaps even junk software are silently running in the background, slowing your computer down.
This is why choosing the best antivirus program like McAfee or Avast for your computer is important. Many AV Suites may slow down your computer’s performance – this is because this security software is constantly on the lookout for malware, scanning your emails, file transfers, online traffic and more to help keep your system secure. All these actions can slow your computer down. These background security actions keep your systems secure – and although these actions may marginally slow down your computers – it should not be a big problem.
But the real question is – by how much do these antivirus programs slow down your computers?
Different AV Suites affect your system’s performance differently. While some may negatively impact your computer’s performance more than others, not all are cut from the same cloth. The results of some independent testing labs revealed that McAfee had some of the lowest scores in malware detection, while others like Kaspersky and Avast had top ranking scores.
Research Before Buying an Antivirus
➡ Should you research well before buying an antivirus program? Yes.
➡ Should you look at all parameters of the AV suite’s performance before purchasing? Yes.
➡ Is it important if your system is negatively impacted? Yes.
This is because your work should not suffer, yet you should not compromise on your cyber security as well. Making sure that all programs are updated to the latest versions, that you free up space on your hard disk, remove programs that are not needed and make sure that you have all your info backed up will ensure that your computer does not slow down more than necessary whilst your antivirus is running. This will also give you peace of mind that you have all your data secure.
What Antivirus Does?
An Antivirus scan creates a lot of activity on the disk – so if you are trying to work on power-hungry programs or intensive tasks whilst a scan is running, expect your system to slow down – especially if you have an HDD and not an SSD. If you have multiple programs running simultaneously, you may run out of RAM, and all your activities may be relying directly on the HDD page file, which will be going through an AV scan at the same time – you’ll find that simple tasks can take you longer.
What to Do?
All we can say is, be regular with all updates, do your research on various antivirus programs, and always make a back up of your data while avoid running power-hungry programs at the same time so that the scan gets over faster and you’ll find no issues with any antivirus program slowing down your system’s performance.