I am undertaking an anti-virus review and firewall review after my current solution started having various system issues and errors that constantly caused them to stop working.

My first test is AVG Anti-Virus which has both a free download version for home users and for pay upgrades to "professional" versions. I started with it because it comes highly recommended among the user community, at least among those who still consider anti-virus software necessary.  There is apparently a growing number of people who question their need, although as a writer who does a lot of articles about various software and utilities that I download from around the Internet (not always from the most friendly of websites), I still feel more comfortable knowing that someone is at least doing a double-check of my computer.

All brand-name virus scanners, and all of the top-rated free anti-virus utilities do a pretty solid job of detecting and eliminating most viruses. The effectiveness tests that often accompany most anti-virus reviews or comparisons generally involve the ability of the software to catch unusual or brand-new viruses. While this is certainly important, for my purposes, an anti-virus program that catches a virus 2 days later than another is good enough.

With that being said, my primary criteria in evaluating both anti-virus and firewall software are ease of use, and most importantly, system resource usage. I have my PC finely tuned to run as fast as possible. I don’t take kindly to system resource hogs. If it bogs down my computer it is gone.

AVG Memory Used Amount

Although imperfect as raw data, the RAM used as "Private Bytes" as shown in Process Explorer from Sysinternals is good enough for comparisons of one program to another. How much memory does AVG use?

I’m not too concerned with how much resources my anti-virus utility uses when running a virus-scan. Generally, I do full scans or even partial scans when I’m not actively using my computer, so I want them to finish as quickly as possible; I don’t care how much RAM or CPU is used.

However, I don’t want my virus software hogging my memory or CPU while I’m trying to get work done with my computer. So, I monitor to see what kind of resources are used by the processes that are "always on" in the background.

That works out to something like 15,000 K to 18,000 K of RAM.  How does that compare to other anti-virus software? I’ll find out as I try them out going forward.

I have all of AVG’s bells and whistles disabled, as well as any Internet scanning or phishing protection not running. Real-time active virus detection is running. Under these conditions, AVG keeps three processes running continuously by default.

1. AVG Watchdog Service
2. AVG Resident Shield Service
3. AVG Tray Monitor

Under normal use on my PC, that is Internet connection on, web browsers open, and maybe something running in the background like a download manager or uTorrent, these processes use the following amounts of RAM memory as measured in private bytes.

• AVG Watchdog uses about 4,500 K of private bytes.
• AVG Resident Shield Services uses between 9,500K and 12,500 K of private bytes
• AVG Tray Monitor uses about 850 K of private bytes.

Keep an eye out for more comprehensive anti-virus reviews of system usage, or save yourself the trouble and grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed.

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So far this morning, I’ve stumbled across some updates from Microsoft that impact me or some of the freelance articles I’m writing (or scheduled to write).

First, Microsoft is no longer accepting beta participants for its Security Essentials program.  Security Essentials is a multi-dimensional securities application, but for the average home user, it is a free virus scanner with free virus definition updates.  While there are other utilities like this out there, this one would presumably come with technical support from Microsoft which could make it a viable option for businesses.  No word on how this would, or would not, impact the other major security vendors out there.

Next, I found out that Dell is offering the same kind of migration assistance and upgrade tools as pretty much every other first-tier PC manufacturer, but for some reason, they get a pretty extensive and flowery write-up in the Windows Blog.  Wonder if there is a marketing deal there, or if Microsoft is just showing some love, or if the Windows team is handing out a little payback for what appears to be some pretty hefty testing work done by Dell during the Windows 7 beta and Windows 7 RC periods.

And lastly, the same Windows Blog apparently is reading my thoughts while I’m laying in bed.  Last night I was going through what the differences are between XP Mode and Med-V , other than that Med-V only is available to business clients with Software Assurance licenses or other enterprise licensing.  Looks like I can use this post as the jumping off point for a nice freelance computer article.

This isn’t news, but I was using Internet Explorer a bit this morning and was thinking that it would be really great if I could customize this page that opens whenever you open a new tab in IE 8.  Not that I can change what page appears when you open a new tab, I know I can do that, but rather that I could change / add to what links are information are displayed on this page:

I’ll haven’t done much with IE 8 other than upgrade to it so that I have the least insecure Internet browser Microsoft makes, so with a little digging, maybe I’ll find that I can do exactly what I want.

Cheers.