Microsoft has put a lot of effort into improving its Windows Defender antivirus, being considered one of the best in the world. It may be that you want a more powerful alternative solution and have decided to install a paid antivirus. If after installing the new antivirus you detect that your PC is slow, we are going to try to give you some solutions to this problem.
First of all, you should know that any application that we install that runs in the background consumes resources. Antiviruses are one of the programs that can consume the most resources in the background, since they persistently seek to detect threats.
Usually, the resource they consume the most is RAM memory. The problem is that when its consumption is complete, the system slows down until space is freed up in it. Additionally, system scans that are typically done in the background consume processor resources.
We have several mechanisms to prevent the antivirus from consuming a large part of the system resources. We are going to explain how to prevent your PC from slowing down after installing threat detection software.
Initial system analysis
The first thing you should do when installing new antivirus software is to perform a full system scan. This is important to detect possible malicious applications or corrupt files.
You should know that, precisely, all antiviruses carry out this process after being installed. If we relegate it to the background, the time it will take will be longer and the experience of using the PC will be bad. The first thing would be to perform a system analysis, which should not take long and then perform a repair.
Check who consumes the resources
Maybe you blame the antivirus for the excessive consumption of RAM and it is possible that you have a zillion tabs open in Google Chrome. We already know the amount of memory this browser occupies, which increases the more tabs you have open.
To verify who is the culprit, you only have to follow these steps:
- Right click on the Windows bar
- Now, in the context menu we click on “Task Manager”.
- We will see all the active processes and the resources they consume.
The good thing about Task Manager is that it tells us the CPU, RAM, disk, network and GPU usage of each software, whether in the foreground or background. We can easily see if it is the antivirus that is making our experience miserable or if it is another application.
One option is to close the process that is consuming a lot of resources. First of all, make sure that it is an annoying program and not some process of the operating system itself. If it is an application, click on it and click the “End task” button.
If it is a Windows process, first try restarting the system to see if the problem persists. If the high consumption of resources persists, search the Internet for more information about the process in question.
Schedule antivirus scans
Many people install the antivirus and that’s it, they forget everything. This is a mistake, since there are a series of adjustments that you should make if you do not want to see your computer become slower than a turtle. Something you should do is establish when and how often the analyzes are performed.
You should know that the antivirus periodically starts scanning processes to avoid malicious software or files. All software of this type allows you to establish the time slot in which this process can be carried out and its frequency.
The ideal is once a week and set it during a period of time when you do not use the computer or do not use it intensively, such as playing games.
