Kaspersky IS: How to optimize speed?

[superboyac]

I've been a devoted Kaspersky user for several years now.  While it's my favorite antivirus suite, I'm convinced that it slows my computer down significantly.  I know this because when I disable it, the internet goes faster and the computer just feels lighter.  And when I talk about speed like this, I mainly mean mouse-click response times.  For example, when i click on a URL, how quickly does the new screen appear and load.  With kaspersky, you can feel it "thinking" before everything actually happens, and you can even see the icon animation in the tray showing that it's working.

My question is, do we really need all this scanning to be safe?  What modules can be turned off safely?  I've already turned off anti-spam and anti-banner, because I have two programs that do it better (Antispamsniper, ad muncher).  But what about the other ones?

[MerleOne]

I had the same issue with another brand a while ago (CA Security Suite).  I switched to Avira Free, then to Rising Free, now in 2010 version (www.freerav.com).  Since then, when I have performance issue, I don't have to check the AV.

[MerleOne]

I forgot to mention I also tried VIPRE a year ago and that performance was the worst ever seen, despite their marketing claim to be the lightest on the market.  I had to stop scanning within archives and some other tweaks (lowering security) to get a decent speed.

[Dormouse]

I came to the end of my KIS contract a month ago (replaced with the good deal on Online Armor, having got KIS on a very good 3-year deal in the first place). Most of the time KIS did not have a significant impact on performance - but was sometimes the problem when stuff suddenly slowed. I really hated the way it would freeze the computer when updating and the way it got confused when different programs relied on different versions of the same dll/java etc. So, I can't help really - you're describing a constant problem where I had an infrequent one. OTOH, all these security programs do hit speed to some extent as they tend to filter/examine almost everything that happens. So long as you have the firewall up, you can disable almost everything else if you are on a known safe site only and not using email, and have used it to do a system scan before. That will give some idea of the maximum improvement you can expect from turning modules off and you can turn them on/off as necessary thereafter to get an idea of which ones give you the greatest hit on performance.