Today's AVID theme is; AntiVirus Is Disruptive. What am I talking about? Well, as regular readers already know, because I keep unearthing and publishing evidence that demonstrates it, AV technology doesn't block malware effectively. It is horribly flawed, primarily because it takes the wrong approach to the problem. Rather than give you a mosquito net, it tries to recognise every mosquito. Actually (as evidence I recently published shows) it doesn't even manage to recognize all known mosquitoes and is pretty much useless when it comes to recognising any previously unseen mosquito.

What to do? Well the thing to do is to get a mosquito net from one of the vendors that provide them. These companies are; AppSense, Bit9, Savant Protection and Secure-Wave. All of them have technology which works by blocking anything new that turns up and either stopping it dead or holding it in some kind of quarantine until its intentions are known.

Companies in the US and Europe are now gradually adopting this technology with the result that they no longer suffer the expense and annoyance of frequent virus infection. In the longer term, we can look forward to a time where viruses can no longer spread because their rates of proliferation will be dramatically cut.

But in the mean time, there is still a large number of companies that have drunk the AV KoolAid. What is the experience of these companies—aside from the fact that they regularly suffer virus infection? The sad truth is that their PCs run much slower because, in failing to protect you adequately from viruses, AV software chews up a whole lot of computer resource.

How much? According to an article by George OU entitled Proof that Antivirus makes your PC crawl, “desktop Antivirus suites all appear to make your PC run slower than a 5 year old computer”. George didn't actually do the investigative work on this. It done by Oli.

So AntiVirus disrupts your PC's performance. If you've converted from the PC to a Mac recently and you're wondering why the Mac is so comparatively fast, this may be one of the reasons.