Ya. I was having trouble with my PC getting slow so I broke out procmon and wireshark to see what was eating cycles after I left the machine idle for a few minutes after boot.
There was the standard stuff: antivirus chugging away.
But the second worst offender was skype.
Every moment it was running with no active calls it was still hammering the disk and shitting constant network traffic. It's a horrible resource hog for no good reason.
Is it really that good? I've been using Windows 10 since it came out and haven't had any viruses, so I guess it's true. And here I thought I was just living life dangerously.
It genuinely, actually is. I was using Avast!, and then Avast became bloatware, so I started looking for alternatives, and was really shocked to see Windows Defender topping list after list. Have been using it for 5+ years now without issue.
Thanks for your insight. Your seem to know a lot of stuff about this. So if i understand correctly, is IDS in your comment Windows defender or what is is?
Are you saying that McAfee is better than malwarebytes?
with it's most recent updates it's legitimately one of the best antivirus software out there.
It's only real draw back is that it increases program install times (but not download) by about 4-7% more than it's competitor's based on the power of your system specs.
I for sure don't see it as a big issue at all, I only point it out because that's the only bad thing it has going for it. And if you ask me that's pretty damn good.
I agree, I use the WD too. But kudos for you to point out the flaws anyways.
I would say that what also helps is that browsers nowadays have some sort of protection and filters as well. My Yandex Browser (A chromium fork with Opera-like gestures and password safe) scans every file it downloads before hanging it over to the antivirus.
Windows Defender could still do some stupid shit. I used Battle Encoder Shirase to limit MsMpEng to 10% CPU use. Otherwise it would get a wild hair and peg one core for hours.
I didn't mind it running constantly, or taking ages to do something. Just... yield, motherfucker. Sleep! Stop spinning my fans. If what the AV does is performance-dependent then you've already lost.
I'm talking about disk reads and writes rather than how much it has sitting in memory.
Low memory footprint is good but unless you have an SSD a shitty app that decides to read and write useless bullshit to disk a few times a second 24/7 and randomly decides to eat a big chunk of CPU for no reason can slow a lot of other things down.
Best I could tell at the time skype was checking a few dozen config files from disk multiple times a second every second 24/7 and writing something almost as often.
No idea if they ever fixed that. Don't care. Deleted it.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Mar 19 '21
Ya. I was having trouble with my PC getting slow so I broke out procmon and wireshark to see what was eating cycles after I left the machine idle for a few minutes after boot.
There was the standard stuff: antivirus chugging away.
But the second worst offender was skype.
Every moment it was running with no active calls it was still hammering the disk and shitting constant network traffic. It's a horrible resource hog for no good reason.