Battle Antivirus for my mom's old PC

Y

yigido

Thread author
Hi friends,

I need to hear some advices on this question.

My mother using and old PC. Here its specs..

1,87GHz Intel Pentium + 4 GB RAM DDR3 + (I added SSD for more responsive system)
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, this is why I am asking this.
I installed Win10 on this PC and PC works so slow. So I cannot use Windows Defender by default.
On Win7, even I did not apply Windows updates, because it makes it slow too.
It needs old gold Win7 without updates.

I need less false positives, less system impact on real-time and adequate protection. Adequate protection, why? Because she already scares from internet. I covered her browser with extension to prevent malicious sites. (with DNS too) I just need your suggestions?

Please comment :) Thanks
yigido
 

Evjl's Rain

Level 47
Verified
Honorary Member
Top Poster
Content Creator
Malware Hunter
Apr 18, 2016
3,684
Hi friends,

I need to hear some advices on this question.

My mother using and old PC. Here its specs..

1,87GHz Intel Pentium + 4 GB RAM DDR3 + (I added SSD for more responsive system)
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, this is why I am asking this.
I installed Windows 10 on this PC and PC works so slow. So I cannot use Windows Defender by default.
On Windows 7, even I did not apply Windows updates, because it makes it slow too.
It needs old gold Windows 7 without updates.

I need less false positives, less system impact on real-time and adequate protection. Adequate protection, why? Because she already scares from internet. I covered her browser with extension to prevent malicious sites. (with DNS too) I just need your suggestions?

Please comment :) Thanks
yigido
I have a laptop with 2gb of ram and crappy CPU, it took forever to open chrome or skype (2 minutes?). It was shipped with windows 8.1 bing edition
I installed windows 7 lite with some personal tweaks and it was lightning fast compared to my i7 laptop with windows 10
I suggest you run "ngen update" for .net framework before windows update, then it should be a lot a lot faster. windows 10 doesnt need it but if you do, w10 will be faster
How to do it? open cmd with administrative privilege
win32:
%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe update
win64:
%windir%\microsoft.net\framework64\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe update

about the AV:
I recommend Avast free with settings from this guide
just add something:
Disable Transient caching (It's a must for me, avast will consume a lot less resource) + disable Hardened mode (I think it's too annoying for average user)
set HIPS sensitivity to 2 instead of 3 because it tends to block some my safe programs, it would be quite annoying for your mom I believe
install Unchecky

That's it. that's my setup for average users, I always bring this combo to my friends' and my desktops
note: avast can be slow and consumes a lot of resource but after a few days, it will be stable
 

jogs

Level 22
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Nov 19, 2012
1,112
One of my PC is 1.6GHz, Dual Core, 2 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD (Upgraded from 160 GB); runs quite well, even graphics SW. Started with XP, was not sure if would be able to take Win 7 (had 160 GB at the time), but it ran smoothly, then again was afraid of Win 10, but the free offer was tempting and it also runs very well. AV is Eset now, but previously used Kaspersky, it was also good. May not be a very fast machine but it has been able to handle everything that has been thrown to it. Now I am going to change to 64 bit and if required increase the RAM to 4 GB, but will like to see what happens with 2GB.
 

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