The Bottom Line On Antivirus and Defragging
Monday, July 7th, 2008Scanning a ZDNet Must Read News Alert when I came across a sponsored link for a white paper on the effect of Defragging on Antivirus scan times.
I’m going to ignore the fact that the whitepaper was ancient. The copyright was “© 2005 Executive Software International, Inc.” and whereas I’m sure it was timely, pertinent information then, it’s ancient history to us today. The computers and antivirus software they listed as a part of their test seemed equally so.
Still, I’ll go out on a limb here and support their basic premise and stated conclusion that defragging your hard drive has a marked effect on antivirus scan times. Anywhere from around 23 to 61% according to the testing conducted by ESI. Those are good numbers and a great justification for keeping our disk drives defragmented regularly.
But here’s the issue I have with the whole thing:
Antivirus software has turned into, in most cases, full blown suites. They scan everything! They can scan all the files on your hard drive. They can scan your inbound and outbound email. They can scan your IM messages. They even scan links you find on webpages to see if there’s anything amiss at the other end of the link. Even the programs that are free or otherwise not billed as being a part of a “Security Suite” have most if not all of these capabilities.
Sadly, the performance of our systems today are mainly hindered by all this redundant scanning going on.
Look, if I have a “resident” scanner examining everything I’m opening and running, why do I need email, IM, and Link scanners running? And if there’s a resident scanner watching all that I do, what is the point of scheduling a nightly scan? Isn’t all of that just redundant?
Defrag your hard drive, but do it for the performance boost it gives your everyday computing, not because it makes an overnight scan go any faster.
Run a resident scanner and be sure it’s up to date, but turn off all the redundant scanning in email, IM, etc.
Your thoughts?
