TO-Tech Blog Todd Ogasawara’s Tech Blog

NOD32 Anti-Virus Doesn’t Hold My PC Hostage

One of the things I hate about Microsoft Windows is how the various required security applications (anti-spyware, anti-virus, etc.) slows my system (no matter how fast or how much RAM I have) to a crawl when they are running.

I've been running ESET's NOD32 Antivirus System (Amazon Affiliate link) on my Vista desktop for a while now. I've been running various Beta versions of Microsoft's OneCare on my XP system for well over a year. However, having become increasingly annoyed by it, I decided to replace it with NOD32 on my XP system as well.

After installing it, I decided to run a full system scan to confirm that the PC is clean. I popped up Windows' Task Manager expecting to see the usual near 100% CPU usage bringing my system to a crawl. Imagine, my surprise when I saw how little impact NOD32 had on system performance while running a full scan. In fact, I took the screen snapshot (performance graph on the right), cropped and resized the screencap, and created this blog entry while NOD32 was running a full system scan in the background.

PC World has it listed as the #4 anti-virus performer (out of with OneCare nowhere in the list. So, I feel pretty good about the switch from OneCare to NOD32 so far.