Hi Guys,

Thanks kindly for the additional information.

I have downloaded Avira, ZoneAlarm and Spybot and all seems to be functioning well, except my system has slowed down somewhat which didnt happen when I was using the ESET Smart Security free version. Can you suggest a reason for this?

While I was surfing some PC sites (eg. PC Review) they discussed ccleaner and crapclean, to improve speed etc. What do you think about these?

Thanks again,

Tom

Hello Tom,

I have used Avira for quite a long time and as far as I know it's not very resource comsuming. You may try to disable the resident protection on Spybot (you already have resident AV running so I guess you could avoid that); this should free some more resources on your machine.
Can't tell anything about Zone Alarm since I've never used it; anyway I read on an italian website it sometimes may give excessive RAM consumption. So try the performance of your machine by surfing a while with firewall enabled and disabled to see if the problem you encountered comes from there. As a firewall I personally use Pc Tools and Comodo on two different machines; no problems of performance so far.

For other issue: I have installed ccleaner on both of my machine and to me this is useful to remove temporary files, cookies, etc you get on the web while surfing (if you use Internet Explorer as primary browser and don't clean temporary Internet fils by routine ccleaner will find a lot uf useless stuff to be removed to free space on your HD), you can fix windows registry and run uninstall of programs you are not using directly from this program. Can't tell about crapclean.

Hope this helps,
Antonio

You can visit the Microsoft cleanup site every month or so to do some cleaning. Cleanup, tuneup or protection scans are available. You can also use Disk Cleanup (it's in your Start menu) to clean up some junk files yourself.

The Microsoft site is at https://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm on the web.

Regards,

Hi Antonio and GuitarBob,

Thanks for the additional info. My reply is late as my provider's (Three) Broadband network went down on Tuesday and came back late yesterday, probably due to the extreme heat we had for two days.

Anyway, I downloaded CCleaner and did a system clean and uninstalled of a couple of long unused programs, and my system seems to have improved. Thanks. Had a look at Disk Cleanup from Help and led me to Start > Run >cleanmgr

Ant, you mentioned 'You may try to disable the resident protection on Spybot...' I had a look at my Spybot main menu but cant figure out how to do this?

Cheers,

Tom

Hello Tom,

If I remember well you have the possibilty to disable the real time protection in Spybot just unticking the 'Resident' option on the taskbar icon. Otherwise you could try to uninstall and reinstall; the install wizard should ask you if you want to install the resident protection,you just have to untick this option (anyway consider that will become permament, so in this case Spybot will not have the reisident protection installed anymore).

Regards,
Antonio