Looking for a good anti-virus program

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The current Anti-virus system I have installed on my computer (AVG 7.5 Free Edition) works fine, but there is a major catch. This particular program, along with several other well-known anti-virus programs, allocate excessive amounts of paged pool memory. This is starting to greatly interfere with some of my games. I tried expanding the existing paged pool memory awhile ago, but AVG just gobbled all of that up.

So basically I'm looking for a good, preferably free anti-virus program that does not allocate excessive amounts of paged pool memory.

And just in case anyone knows... Why do so many Anti-virus programs do this? It seems like an unneeded inconvenience to me, especially since you can't turn it off manually.

avast seems to work pretty well.

Surely... you don't expect Microsoft to let you play games, AND be protected against viruses?

avgamsvr.exe: mem usage 344k, vm size 3,664k, paged pool 40k
the other processes are very symilar.

what are yours?
windows version?
ram?
what service packs?

Almost immediately after posting this thread I remembered that there is a list of known antivirus programs that goggle up all your paged memory in the tech support section of the steam website.

I then just googled "antivirus" and looked for a program that wasn't on the list. I ended up getting PC Tools Antivirus. And so far it seems that it fixed all my problems. I haven't had a single crash, or graphical failure since then, and my framerate even improved slightly.

I probably should of looked harder before posting this thread. Thanks for your time anyways.

I've been meaning to switch to AVG, but Avast has worked wonders for me.

Try NOD32, It will cost you but its well worth.[ NOD32 is so efficent it only takes up 4MB Memory and runs flawless even on Machines in Pentium Class.] NOD32 is the one program that finally got me off Symantec.[Symantec was good a couple of years ago but all the newer versions eat up memory in the 512MB Chucks.] I believe when Symantec merged with Norton in 2004 things went downhill.

I used to use AVG. It worked perfectly for years. I rarely touch my XP now. I last booted to a "real" version over 6 months ago, but I've run one under VirtualBox a few times - e.g. to see what the latest version of Skype on Windows looks like. There, I keep a compressed copy of the image for the installed XP+<everything I like, including AVG, AdAware and so on>. A 3.2GByte file. If I get a (virtual) virus, it takes a couple of minutes to unpack a clean XP system (with a fortnight's extra installation of bits'n'bobs - Firefox, Google Earth, you know... all those bits you forgot to re-install, plus all the login setup for various stuff and so forth).

Anyway, digression over... If you like Avast, stick with it. How many times has it let you become infected? I can see no reason to fall for the hype of non-free (anti?)virus programs. I've seen people infected by "antivirus" programs that just took their money (WinAntiVirusPro) and people totally shut out of their machine by commercial products (Norton - several ways, including blocked at MBR, because of a failed "backup").

No antivirus is ever going to stop all the Windows viruses, as a genuinely new virus has to be seen before any start can be made on protecting against it.

Whenever you have any program recommended to you, especially something that you are going to hand over your machine to, research it thoroughly. E.g. NOD32 sounds good, but it would... and has unsurprisingly acquired a "This article or section is written like an advertisement." tag on its Wikipedia article. Admitting that it is written in assembler makes me worried. I'm heavily into assemblers. They are indispensable for writing very small sections of code that need to be very efficient. Having more than a small amount of assembler code in a project is a recipe for disaster. Ultimately it makes the product slower and larger. Invariably it makes it unmanageable and vulnerable. Expect some clever viruses to successfully attack the deep NOD32 code, soon, if they are not already around, and presently concealed.

Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic (review by download,com)

For a free antimalware and antivirus app that also runs in your system's background, AntiVir works surprisingly well.

AntiVir's scans are flexible, allowing the user to fully scan all hard drives, choose a preloaded scan--for rootkits, for example--or customize a scan. Combining the antimalware with the antivirus is a luxury in a free scanner. After testing on several machines no viruses turned up, although several malicious hidden files did rear their heads. The heuristic scan can be turned on or off completely or partially, with three different intensity levels.

The quarantine is extensively thorough, too. The spreadsheet layout displays all relevant information about the quarantined file, and gives you options to scan it again, restore, delete, and more. The scheduler is fully customizable. However, the updater slowly chugs along, but thankfully updated definitions files are available at Avira's Web site. The help features in AntiVir were excellent, as well, with a description box relaying mouse-over information on each feature.

Initial concerns about the real-time Guard protection hamstringing system performance proved groundless. Although we could shut off AntiVir and its Guard, there was no way to remove the icon from the system tray or stop the occasional ad placement by Avira. The Complete Scan is numbingly slow, but it will stop midscan and let you know when it's found a threat. That's good for killing nasties, but it also means that you have to baby-sit it.

AntiVir's volume of features might take a while to get used to, but as long as the definitions file updates keep coming, this app's a keeper.