Lightweight, minimalist antivirus for XP print server?

esuhl

I have a (very old and very slow) XP machine that I use as a print server (and scanner).

I'm not sure if I really need an antivirus on it. It's behind my router's firewall, UPnP is disabled on the network, unnecessary services have been disabled and it's not used for web browsing or installing new software. It's hardly ever switched on! But I thought it might be worth running the occasional scan...

I tried Avast, but it made the PC completely unusable. Clamwin sounded promising, but reviews suggest that its detection rate is pretty poor.

So I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions? Is it worth installing an antivirus on it at all? Are there any REALLY lightweight virus scanners that don't need to be running all the time?

closed

why did avast make it unusable, no ram, high commit charge?

esuhl

closed wrote: »

why did avast make it unusable, no ram, high commit charge?

It took forever to boot up and ran at an absolute snail's pace. Often it seemed to freeze completely after logging in. It's a PIII 1GHz CPU with 384MB RAM with a clean-build of XP (tweaked with nLite). So it's slow at the best of the times (but faster with all the unnecessary components disabled).

Anyway, Avast even slows down my Windows 7 Core i7 PC noticibly, and I've had a few problems when new versions have been released. The latest version seems stable enough, though, but still way too bloated for my ageing XP machine.

Maybe I don't even need an antivirus... I can't see how the PC could realistically become infected... :-/ But I've always been cautious!

closed

I've used avast on a p3 with 512MB, without noticing any speed problems, boots in 35 seconds, but lately it's growing with extra bits a little, disabling the ie plugin (on W7 and xp) and boot scan (xp) may help. It's still one of the lightest, and should fly on w7.

whats the commit charge and peak commit from task manager, performance, lack of ram may be the issue.

hijackthis log may show something up

esuhl

closed wrote: »

I've used avast on a p3 with 512MB, without noticing any speed problems, boots in 35 seconds, but lately it's growing with extra bits a little, disabling the ie plugin (on W7 and xp) and boot scan (xp) may help. It's still one of the lightest, and should fly on w7.

The problems on Win7 have been when new versions of Avast were released. One particular version a few months ago seemed to cause boot problems (well... Windows initialisation problems) on every machine I put it on! The PCs with Avast now take a little longer to boot up, but the latest version seems to have fixed all the other problems. They perform fine once they've booted/initialised now, anyway. Avast seems so much heavier than Avira (I was using the old version from just over a year ago, with the latest virus definitions).

But I digress!

closed wrote: »

whats the commit charge and peak commit from task manager, performance, lack of ram may be the issue.

Well, I'm not sure what they should be, but here are the figures:

Commit Charge (K)
Total: 101,196
Limit: 940,484
Peak: 105,648

After booting and logging in, CPU utilisation seems to be bouncing every few seconds between ~10% and ~40%.

After a bit of "heavy usage" -- running a few malware scans, checking browser and network settings, etc. then closing everything again, the details were:

Commit Charge (K)
Total: 125,240
Limit: 940,484
Peak: 459,712

closed wrote: »

hijackthis log may show something up

I doubt it -- the performance has been fairly constant since I set it up. A scan with MBAM comes back clean but the HJT log is here if you can make sense of it: http://pastebin.com/hY2dvdP7

droopsnoot

Not by any means conclusive, but I used to run an old Dell P3 1GHz machine as a print server in the office. That was running XP Home, and towards the end of its life it was also running a small free FTP server and acted as a remote PDF creator, and had TridiaVNC (I think) on it so I didn't have to actually get up to reset anything on it.

I didn't run AV on it, though the office had a network AVG subscription. I disabled updates, UPnP, File sharing, and removed the default gateway so it had no means of getting out to the internet. In theory as every other PC or server had the anti-virus installed, and those were the only devices it could see, there should be no problem, and in practice there was no problem.

closed

current commit is low, presumable without any antivirus, but it goes over installed ram when used, which will slow things up a little.

not much bloat other than vnc(presumably you need this for rc)/secunia/mozilla maintenance/wscntfy/ctfmon as expected after using nlite

leaving windows update on can slow boot times - look at which process is causing the cpu hog