In short, NO! By shutting down your antivirus, you put your computer and quite possibly your entire network at risk.

If you believe your antivirus software is slowing down your computer, it’s quite possible that settings can be tweaked to remedy that problem. For example, excluding certain folders from real time scanning would introduce minimal risk but could dramatically improve your systems performance without disabling the scanner.

If tweaks aren’t enough and your system is really dragging with the antivirus installed, perhaps a simple, low-cost memory upgrade will solve the problem. If a memory upgrade won’t help, you need to look at what antivirus software you are running and what it’s minimum and recommended system requirements are. For example, we find that Symantec and Mcaffee Antivirus commonly slow down system performance on anything but high-end systems.

Centrend generally recommends AVG from Grisoft as a very thorough antivirus/antispyware solution that has the least amount of impact on overall system performance. If you are a business user, you’ll find that licensing AVG is about HALF the cost of a similar offering from Symantec.

Now if you are a home user you’re going to love this: AVG is available for FREE! No trials or ads or expiration. It’s free. Period. You can obtain AVG for free for your home computer from this link: http://free.avg.com While the professional (business) version is more full featured, the free edition does the three key things I need an anti-virus software to do:

• Real time scanning for virus and spyware
• Daily sceduled scans
• Exclusion list capability

-Paul
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Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115