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My gripe about Anti-Virus Software |
It is a sad world we live in - a world where our internet experiences are destroyed by Virus Attacks and Junk Mail. But my biggest problem is the "bloat" which seems to be taking place in Anti Virus software.
Ok, the simple truth is that Anti Virus software should kill a virus when it lands on your computer. It doesn't have to look pretty and it certainly doesn't have to have a million other functions and options. Its just gotta kill a virus. Take Nortons, McAfee, and Computer Associates / Vet Anti-Virus (ETrust) for example - all of them are suffering from bloat! They are huge applications which consume more system resources than they should or need to. Remove Nortons and your PC speed almost doubles, the same for McAfee's. But CA / Vet used to be so good - it was small, didn't consume resources, hardly affected PC performance and found more viruses than Norton and McAfee combined. But now Vet has suffered the same fate as the others - it has grown into a "Security Centre" which destroys your computers performance. As a programmer myself I was taught to 'optimize code' - make it as small as possible and as fast as possible while using a minimum of system resources. The guys writing Anti-Virus software just throw it all together without any thought for those whose systems aren't super speed machines with heaps of RAM.
Graphical interfaces are partly to blame! Pretty buttons and nice colours make a program look cool but doesn't add anything to its ability to perform the job it was designed to do. But each button, BitMap in memory, and other stuff designed to be pleasing to the eye consume resources and that in turn slows your computer down. Let's face it - you don't see the Anti-Virus most of the time, it's just an icon in your task bar but all that nice graphical stuff is loaded and running just in case you want to look at it some time.
The other big issue with these is the way in which a virus is caught. The way I see it is that a virus should never appear on your hard disk, it should be detected in memory before it is written to the drive and destroyed. This might be a simplistic view but would save a lot of work on the PC. Hook incoming data streams and check them, if something is found then route the stream into oblivion.
All the flash stuff we have to put up with such as user interfaces and alike are a waste of time. A simple service running in the background would be all that is needed to handle a virus. Why consume 30-50MB of RAM and 100MB of disk space when it isn't needed. What about the poor sods still running on a 1Ghz Machine with 256MB of RAM - why should they suffer because the programmers who write this stuff don't know what they are doing and are to lazy to optimize.
In fact, it is probably the executives who don't have a programming background who are to blame. They say "we want this to look pretty and we want it to make us money" and the programming team have to figure out how to make it all work.
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