MS Security Essentials slows down the PC quite heavily, even with deactivated background scan

On a freshly installed PC, I've installed MSE and deactivated all background tasks and realtime protection options. (only to use it as an on-demand scanner)

Still, the PC boots over 10 seconds slower than before the installation. What gives? I've deactivated all the crap. OK, the computer isn't the newest (an Core 2 Duo), this isn't an excuse though.

The speed penaly goes only away when you uninstall it. Do the test too, and you will see.

Avira doesn't slow the PC down if you deactivate realtime scan and all the other junk. 
Haven't tested the other bloatmonsters on this computer yet.

I've never seen a 10 second slower boot even with keeping all the background tasks on. Might I suggest running something like Soluto to figure out what's going on.

Well, the slow boot time went away immediately after I de-installed. I also tried to defrag the disk before, didn't improve.

Didn't know about Soluto, thanks Maybe I'll try to test it with it later.

Then turn it off and pay for a different anti-virus product and see if your machine speeds up.

I'm using security essentials because Norton and McAffee were the ones slowing my machines down to a halt.

Essentials is OK by my book.

Freshly installed windows can be very slow at rebuilding index or something, excluding super HDD updates. I mean, I have busy long startup after image recovery, so it was rebuilding something,  MSE not installed.

@magicalclick: Try a SSD

@wastingtimewithforums: Freshly installed PC? In my experience, Windows Vista+ needs a good week to settle down. Try your test again in a week and I think you won't see any difference in boot time.

18 minutes ago, spivonious wrote

@wastingtimewithforums: Freshly installed PC? In my experience, Windows Vista+ needs a good week to settle down.

I know, but the delay went immediately away after I de-installed it...

Anyway, maybe I'll try it later, but for now I tamed the Avira anti-virus beast. I've deactivated all the background stuff, - unfortunately it won't update itself then. So I now made a script which activates some background services, lets Avira update and shuts it all down again.

These anti-virus beasties are nasty little naggers.

My previous solution was running XP Mode loaded with MSE just for scanning the files I downloaded within the host. The handling was a bit funky though, even more than my current setup. I ran MSE because I noticed that Avast behaved odd there (the VM often didn't shudown properly with it) and Avira wasn't able to access the host in the free version (thought it was network drive).

If the Safety Scanner could update itself without the need to download that whole package again all the time, it would be so perfect for my purpose.

Sometimes I wish I would rather have a virus then a virus scanner

How much RAM are you sporting (and on what OS)? MSE is a bit of a hog on startup. I've seen it balloon to a couple hundred MB before settling down to about 60MB, and it also likes to spend time scanning other startup processes. But on our crappy P4 2.4GHz machines running XP and recently upped to 1GB RAM expressly for MSE and WU churning, I don't see 10 min slowdowns. A couple minutes maybe, but these machines were already like that with their older, lighter (but now unsupported) AV.

Win 7 with 6 GB.

43 minutes ago, wastingtimewithforums wrote

Win 7 with 6 GB.

Well I don't know what ... wait a minute ... I just noticed you said 10 seconds!

Much less suprised at the delay now. And FWIW, I was thinking about the post login churn before the machine becomes useful. To what stage of bootup is this 10 seconds being added?

25 minutes ago, DCMonkey wrote

*snip*

To what stage of bootup is this 10 seconds being added?

the core boot-up stage (Windows logo animation), it also takes a bit longer before the login screen is completely ready.