Suggestions for a productive hardware setup with excellent virus protection.

Question

This question is a little opinion based, but I think it can be based in fact and I would prefer answers backed up with a link to a reputable company if possible.

The problem is at my job, we have "okay" hardware for the developers, laptops running Windows XP (I know) with dual core 2.3 Ghz processor, 2GB of memory and 60 GB hard disk @7200 rpm however, the amount of virus scan and security agents and big brother software on these make them unusable when scans are running. My company insists on running full disk virus scans every monday and "smart scans" every other day.

I appreciate the concern for viruses as much as the next guy, however it is hindering our work and we are looking for a new setup that allows the developers to work unimpeded by scans, yet provides virus protection et al that the company is looking for.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Couldn't you just schedule the scans for when the computers aren't in use? This would lead to a higher power consumption, but would save you the burden of suffering through the scans.

You could also change the priority of the scanning applications so that they only use up idle CPU and IO time.

Answer 2

Have you looked at Avast? Avast.com I use the free home edition on all the computers around the house running Windows and have not noticed any slowdown and/or viruses since using it. They also have a professional/enterprise version that might work for you.

In addition, what about using Firefox with Adblock and NoScript for your web browsing?

Answer 3

a) Try to change the scanning frequency/schedule - the machines are presumably running on-access scanning, so don't need to be doing scheduled scans.

b) If the policy is immutable; profile the machine to see what resource is being exhausted. It's probably the disk - laptops tend to have poor disks, and both AV-scheduled-scan and development/compilation tend to stress IO. So look at putting the fastest disks in the laptops - or even SSD.