Your Antivirus is probably slowing down your PC more than the Spectre patch can

Your security comes at a price; there is no debate about it; the better the protection, the bigger the price you are going to pay. In the digital electronics world, we were reminded of that fact time and time again, ever since news broke that Intel chips are facing the Meltdown and Spectre Speculative Execution vulnerability.

The official patch being given by Microsoft in partnership with Intel works at the expense of your machine’s speed. This news is obviously not welcomed, we all hate slow computers. Freezing and slow computers have been known to stress out the users. So as much as we all needed the security patch, it was a bitter peel to take as we all loathe anything that is coming to slow down our computers.

But guess what, your PC has been running significantly slower thanks to your antivirus. The speed sacrifice your PC suffers because of the antivirus is proportionately higher, than what it experience when you install the Spectre patch.

That is according to AV-Test.org; the regular publishers of reports on effects of popular antivirus software on PC performance. As AV-Test.org puts it, your typical antivirus will slow down the loading time of websites by 11-16%, slow down the launch of an application by 9-15%, slow down installation of a new application by 26-35%, and slow down copying of files by 7-18%.

You need to understand that the stats above are merely averages, and no two antivirus software are the same. Some are worse off than others, making your PC perform much slower than the figures given above. AV-Test.org for instance, says the inbuilt antivirus on Windows 10 – Windows Defender – slows down the installation of a new application by as much as 54%.

It is interesting to note that the AV-Test.org’s tests were done on a high-end PC running on Intel i7 3770 @3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, and Samsung 512 GB SSD. Before you start entertaining the idea of working with your PC without an antivirus, you should know such an idea, is a very bad…bad idea. Instead, you should focus on installing an antivirus that beefs up your security, without slowing down your PC too much; the key point being not slowing down PC processes too much.