updater apps that steal memory and CPU speed (RANT!)

[tezza]

Gawd,

I just gave the Windows XP box I use to support my vintage computing a major overhaul. It's a 2.5GHZ pentium 4 but it had slowed to a crawl...particularly on boot up. I disabled all those "search for updates" autorun on startup applications (you know, Java, Google, Adobe etc.) and man, what a difference! The Abode ones were the worst. Almost akin to malware.

The computer was back to it's old self, but I then added an extra 1GB of memory bringing it up to 2GB. It's running sweetly now. I have noticed Dropbox still takes it's time to get going. That's one application I certainly want to keep though. The other one still there is AVG. That's an overhead too, but it has discovered a few old MS-DOS viruses on old floppies so I'll put up with it.

[Gibsaw]

Also doesn't help when even the leanest and meanest browsers (even chrome) are now pushing 100MB per instance/tab... ridiculous.

[lizardb0y]

Also doesn't help when even the leanest and meanest browsers (even chrome) are now pushing 100MB per instance/tab... ridiculous.

Quite so.

FreeDOS
Arachne

Should run with under 2MB memory; about 512K convential, 1MB XMS/EMS from memory.

[Carcenomy]

Give AVG the arse, it's a bloaty fat behemoth these days. If you insist on free, I've been having pretty good luck with Security Essentials, otherwise it's NOD32 or go home