What's wrong with Windows?

Posted by dan7000
Aug 15, 2010 at 11:42 PM

One big difference between most Windows machines and most non-Windows machines: virus checkers. Most people have a virus scan running in the background all the time on Windows, but not on other OS’s. Depending on the anti-virus application, this can seriously slow down your system.

Based on personal experience, symantec / norton antivirus is the worst in this respect. When I was managing software development projects we discovered that build times were three times as long with NAV running. Unfortunately, symantec has conned a lot of businesses into requiring NAV on all machines, thus seriously harming the productivity of the whole country

As someone else noticed, Windows apps open a lot of files. Imagine how much extra time it takes if every time you open any file, that file is first checked to see if its signature matches any one of a hundred thousand virus signatures. Ugh.

There are lots of websites that test this stuff. Here’s an example: http://reviews.cnet.com/1990-6600_7-6655968-1.html
You can see that it adds approximately 30% to the time of any task if you are running NAV. The worst programs nearly double the time of many tasks. Even the best (Kapersky in this test) has a substantial (5-10%) impact.