12-13-2019, 12:09 PM
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.
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.