Just installed McAfee Total protection on laptop and now my computer is really slow. Any ideas? B/band ok etc?

Answer 1

As others have said; McAfee and Norton are definitely "resource hogs". They don't eat up as much CPU resources as they do RAM resources.

Here are some tips to help speed up your PC and monitor it's performance.


A major cause of slow PC's is fragmentation of the hard drive.
You need to defragment the HD at least once a week if not more depending on how much you use your computer, and what you do with it.

A great program for defragging automatically is Diskeeper 10. It costs $30 but is well worth it. Go to http://www.download.com and search for Diskeeper. Read the Publishers Description and the tech and user reviews. It can be scheduled to run automatically as the program deems necessary, and if you are using your PC and the program launches itself, it will take a backseat to whatever you are doing and give you the priority for CPU usage. I think you'll agree it's a good program to have. It precludes your needing to remember to defrag at regular intervals.

Also, another major cause of a slow PC is programs that are running in the background. Here's another great program, and it's free. Go to http://www.sysinternals.com and download the program named "autoruns". This utility will tell you exactly what is running on your PC and provides a nice and easy way to shut down the ones you don't want to boot at start up. Once you have it installed use the tabs at the top of the window to access the various categories. If you use the "everything" tab it will overwhelm you because the list is massive. All you have to do is uncheck the box next to the program name and the program will not start at your next boot up. Hurry as this site has been bought up by Microsoft and these free programs may not be around much longer.

Another good thing to have is a little program called FreeRAM Pro. It is free and is available from http://www.download.com This program puts a little RAM meter on the System Tray and shows how much RAM you have remaining that you are not using at any given time. With only 256M of RAM I think you are going to be surprised at how little RAM you have to run other programs. Also, once it is installed you can right click on the little meter, then click on RESTORE and it will open the RAM display window. You can tweak the settings so it will display your CPU usage also.

Answer 2

McAfee will take over your entire system . It becomes like ,the whole purpose of your computer is just to provide an environment for McAfee and everything is secondary, as if the virus protection is the most important thing on your computer.

It WILL slow everything down. Sometimes I think the virus protection is worse than a virus.


Sometimes you can disable the feature that lets it scan EVERY damn file before it allows you to open it. This might speed things up a bit.


Good luck, it's a common problem.

Answer 3

These so called protections suites are known for eating up system resources in a major way. Norton and McAfee are both quite bad about this. You are much better off picking best in class individual components from smaller companies that do not write such bloated code.

Answer 4

Both McAfee and Norton (Symantec) are very memory hungry applications and will slow your PC down considerably. There are many free applications available that do the same job as well, or even better in many cases, that don't use so much of the free memory.

Answer 5

It's resident and so taking up memory. Right click your taskbar and get Task manager - click for performance. I have antivirus, explorer, Internet explorer, MSN messenger Google toolbar and stuff and i'm using 537 Mb. I have 1 gig. Some computers - that only have 256Mb of memory would use hard drive space as virtual memory - and be dead slow. In fact this was this morning - and so I stopped a few running that I wouldn't need - like my nuclear missile launcher.....

Answer 6

Had a nightmare with AVG Free edition as it consumed too much resources.

Simple solution- Get rid of it (unless you have paid £££ to buy it) and install minimalistic virus protection like clamwin. Downside is that you have to manually check virus for virus in downloaded stuff.

Answer 7

Mcafee and norton will slow down your PC, they are resource hogs

Answer 8

Those security suites WILL slow you down, especially when they are scanning (everything will crawl)

If you only have 256mb of RAM, doubling that to 512 will help your performance, since your system is probably running short on memory.

Answer 9

It uses lots of resources. Its a trade off between speed & security.

Answer 10

when i used McAfee,i had nothing but trouble with it,i wouldn't waist money on it.