Netbookuser.info

With the massive invasion of the netbooks in the last couple of years the problem with securing them becomes more and more important. But how is the netbook different from an ordinary laptop or even your home desktop system? Though netbooks are similar to laptops, there are several issues that we should consider when deciding on which Antivirus to choose for our netbook protection:

First of all, most often netbooks utilize the less power consuming Inter Atom CPUs, which together with the advantage of being less consuming brings the disadvantage of providing less computing power. And as we all know, most Antivirus programs tend to be CPU intensive. So there goes our first consideration – Antivirus for Netbooks should be as much CPU resources reserving as possible.

Antivirus software that is CPU consuming is no option – here are some real life impressions that back the theory:

-- Below are extracts from forums where specifics for Antivirus for Netbooks were commented:

“McAfee Enterprise on the netbook but it is a no-go. It keeps freezing and bringing the machine to a crawl, esp.with webbrowsing. And I can see the culprit, MCShield is up at 50%. (Hogging the whole netbook of course, because 50% is actually 95% in practical terms for an Atom. This is a HT device not dual core).”

“I've been using Avast and Malwarbytes on my Asus 900HA netbook without a problem. Neither (except while doing full scans of course) seem to have any impact on performance.”

“avira antivir - runs lighter than avast IMO”

--

Secondly, having in mind that often netbooks come equipped with a small and slow SSD or HDD (low price is king for netbooks, we all know that) we should consider an Antivirus Program that does not take too much space on our hard disk (SSD).

And thirdly, again with memory considerations, but this time about the RAM. Even in 2010 RAM is not unlimited, so we must choose an Antivirus that would capture as low RAM resources as possible. Those users that tend not to restart their netbook often (just hibernate or sleep) should know that some programs increase the quantity of RAM used with the time passing, so it is advisable to restart your netbook now and then (once in a couple of days would be enough).

to be continued...