[ikk157]

Hello everyone,

I’ve got a very old laptop of mine which is currently my only windows system. However, it is an extremely low-end laptop with horrible specs as follows:

Single core intel atom at 1.82Ghz
2GB of DDR2 RAM
300GB HDD
Windows 8.1 (originally came with windows 7 starter, but it somehow runs much better on windows 8.1. I tried Windows 10 and it was on the verge of unusable).

It has become significantly harder to manually detect malware and delete it, which is what I’ve done in the past.

I’ve used several paid antivirus software before, the ones that you can buy on any electronic store (such as Kaspersky). But they just seem to be too heavy for my low speced laptop, so it struggles to do anything with the antivirus process running.

And hence, are there any extremely light antivirus software that are also free? I’ve already paid enough for other antiviruses and don’t see myself spending more money on more.

Thanks

[rudra]

the only solution i can see is you make a bootable usb of some antivirus software that you can use for free. I read that some antivirus softwares support booting a system from usb and running full scan with updated virus db for free. That might be the only fast option for you and also it wont hog your system which you can now run without any antivirus. i do that and i never had any problem with virus.

[ikk157]

the only solution i can see is you make a bootable usb of some antivirus software that you can use for free. I read that some antivirus softwares support booting a system from usb and running full scan with updated virus db for free. That might be the only fast option for you and also it wont hog your system which you can now run without any antivirus. i do that and i never had any problem with virus.

I never knew there were bootable antivirus softwares. This is quite interesting honestly. How will it be able to access the windows files? Shouldn’t there be some sort if security against that? If not, then that’s really concerning since anyone can steal your files through booting your system up to an OS made just for that.

[rudra]

i am really astounded to know that you didn't know one could do that on your pc if they had physical access to it. unless you have total disc encryption, your files are lying in the open and even if they fail to boot within the os, they can always boot another os and steal your files or whatever.

[ikk157]

i am really astounded to know that you didn't know one could do that on your pc if they had physical access to it. unless you have total disc encryption, your files are lying in the open and even if they fail to boot within the os, they can always boot another os and steal your files or whatever.

That’s honestly straight up ridiculous. All of that should’ve been encrypted by windows. The fact that the files are just laying there accessible by any os is outrageous. Windows is one hell of a security nightmare... the amount of vulnerabilities it has makes it not suitable for use... yet here it is being used on the majority of the computers.

[Mashiro]

@ikk157

Well, you can encrypt Windows systems with Bitlocker or other encryption software that supports full disk OS encryption (will mostly install its own bootloader to be able to decrypt the disk to boot from it normally) like Veracrypt. Nothing stops you from doing that. Bitlocker is built into Windows since like Windows Vista and Windows Server from 2008.

Here you go:
- https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-b...windows-10
- https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/6169/use...your-data/

A normal Linux installation is exactly like Windows in that regards. You can run fdisk from a live CD and check which disk has which partitions... and after that just mount those partitions and look at all the content inside, perform modifications on configuration files and do a lot of other good (useful for data recovery and fixing up a broken OS)/bad stuff. Most people who install Linux don't setup encryption for their partitions either.

I really like the Debian installer for offering to setup encrypted partitions straight during the installation process. So if I usually install Debian and need encryption I already set everything up during the installation. Not sure if it is still the case but distributions like Ubuntu and many others lack this feature. Although Ubuntu allows to encrypt the home folder of the user.

You can of course set it up afterwards I guess.

[ikk157]

@ikk157

Well, you can encrypt Windows systems with Bitlocker or other encryption software that supports full disk OS encryption (will mostly install its own bootloader to be able to decrypt the disk to boot from it normally) like Veracrypt. Nothing stops you from doing that. Bitlocker is built into Windows since like Windows Vista and Windows Server from 2008.

Here you go:
- https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-b...windows-10
- https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/6169/use...your-data/

A normal Linux installation is exactly like Windows in that regards. You can run fdisk from a live CD and check which disk has which partitions... and after that just mount those partitions and look at all the content inside, perform modifications on configuration files and do a lot of other good (useful for data recovery and fixing up a broken OS)/bad stuff. Most people who install Linux don't setup encryption for their partitions either.

I really like the Debian installer for offering to setup encrypted partitions straight during the installation process. So if I usually install Debian and need encryption I already set everything up during the installation. Not sure if it is still the case but distributions like Ubuntu and many others lack this feature. Although Ubuntu allows to encrypt the home folder of the user.

You can of course set it up afterwards I guess.

Well honestly taking that approach could be near impossible in my system. My laptop is extremely low speced and encrypting all of its data manually now would most likely take forever. Also, since windows doesn’t encrypt the files by default, won’t encrypting them manually make me unable to use their troubleshooting tools on a bootable Windows installation drive?

[Mashiro]

Microsoft would have been really stupid if they wouldn't have thought of that issues. When using such tools you will be presented with a Windows Bitlocker screen to enter your password to decrypt the disk/partitions for doing any of the troubleshooting. Atleast that is how I know it from a few business notebooks I worked on that had Windows 7 and Bitlocker activated for the whole disk.

Anyway. It looks like we're going off topic here.


To your original question. For a nowdays antivirus to work on such a lowend system you might be asking for too much. I know for instance that older versions of ESET NOD32 would barely use memory (generally so far in my experience ESET NOD32 was one of the AVs with the smallest resource footprint). However nowadays I simply use the inbuild Windows Defender (Windows 10 1809 LTSC) and my systems have respectively 8 GB / 24 GB / 16 GB and 32 GB of RAM. I tried to use a one of the first Acer small ultrabooks that had a dead slow Intel Atom and 1 GB of RAM with Windows 7. You can barely do anything so already and any kind of AV would kill it even more. 2 GB of RAM aren't better in any way nowdays.

I would ditch that thing. If you need something with Windows there are better alternatives for less than 300 USD. They usually have more RAM and some even a SSD as their drive. Sure they cut corners on stuff like screen and keyboard quality but they're most likely better than your current Windows device.

[ikk157]

Microsoft would have been really stupid if they wouldn't have thought of that issues. When using such tools you will be presented with a Windows Bitlocker screen to enter your password to decrypt the disk/partitions for doing any of the troubleshooting. Atleast that is how I know it from a few business notebooks I worked on that had Windows 7 and Bitlocker activated for the whole disk.

Anyway. It looks like we're going off topic here.


To your original question. For a nowdays antivirus to work on such a lowend system you might be asking for too much. I know for instance that older versions of ESET NOD32 would barely use memory (generally so far in my experience ESET NOD32 was one of the AVs with the smallest resource footprint). However nowadays I simply use the inbuild Windows Defender (Windows 10 1809 LTSC) and my systems have respectively 8 GB / 24 GB / 16 GB and 32 GB of RAM. I tried to use a one of the first Acer small ultrabooks that had a dead slow Intel Atom and 1 GB of RAM with Windows 7. You can barely do anything so already and any kind of AV would kill it even more. 2 GB of RAM aren't better in any way nowdays.

I would ditch that thing. If you need something with Windows there are better alternatives for less than 300 USD. They usually have more RAM and some even a SSD as their drive. Sure they cut corners on stuff like screen and keyboard quality but they're most likely better than your current Windows device.

Windows defender just doesn’t seem enough at all. I still get all sorts of malware that i have to manually get rid of. And honestly, I’m not going to spend a penny on another windows PC, I’d much rather save up and eventually, one day, get a mac instead.

[hamed]

You can use this article and download the desired antivirus (using Chrome browser translator).
https://antivirus.comodo.com/
I'm using the same antivirus myself right now

Note:  Link to comodo antivirus changed as original link was in Arabic.  Deanhills