When it comes to my computers, I never mix business and pleasure.. the cost of an second system for general use, internet browsing, email etc is far less costly than having my âproductionâ or business system down on the open while Iâm trying to remove the virus or spyware thatâs bringing it to its knees.
Here are a few items to âconsiderâ and if you have time to read on, a very basic introduction to a few common pitfalls.
Use a personal firewall and actually configure it to block all traffic except that required by your business application and tools you actually use. Many default to a âhome networkâ and sometimes assume you have a router with a firewall, and do things like allow broadcasting of windows network names⦠always better safe than sorry.
Use an adware / spyware tool that at least attempts to prevent them from being downloaded to your system. There are many tools that simply scan your system after the fact, and when you are already having performance problemsâ¦. Not one tool will catch or remove them all; Panda, Norton, McAfee etc are all good âcompleteâ solutions (anti-virus, adware, spyware, firewall, email scanning) but when it comes to adware and spyware, each will find and remove some percentage that the others missed. We actually use two; Norton Internet Security Suite complimented with webroot. If your tool of choice has âautomated scheduled scansâ make sure you set it up to run when you donât need to do any work..
They ALL carry a footprint, and will consume memory and CPU cycles; Some more than others. To minimize impact to your system, limit activity to your business apps; if you are not downloading email or surfing the web, the tools are not working to scan, thus less impact. Also make sure that you define âtrustedâ sites and ports. Generally speaking, if you define your market data service providers as âsafeâ, the tools will have less work to do.
Disk Defragmentation can make a difference as well, especially if you are sharing the OS and DATA on the same physical drive (a disk I/O does not care about a partition) and a fragmented disk can slow I/Oâs in general because read operations on fragmented files require the drive to reposition the head and wait on platter rotations to âgatherâ all the pieces of the file. These slower operations can cause other read / write operations to âqueueâ up, and under a bit of load, you now have a bottle neck on the disk, which is already the slowest operation on your computer.
Regarding Vista; The footprint (memory and CPU consumption) Depend on the release (Basic, Professional, Ultimate, Business etc). They are all âVistaâ but load different components and options; Ultimate for example, Chews up an amazing 7-800MB or so and Professional about 6-700MB. (With Norton loaded to be fair) On a system with 2 GB memory, almost half is already gone the OS. Launch a dozen or so charts, and you will quickly see the rest diminish to the point your system will start paging, a very bad thing when it comes to performance. In short (very short) the OS starts using the paging file on your hard disk as memory; continually moving chunks of memory in and out of this file to meet the demand of your applications. The âsnow ballâ effect here is that the more paging going on, the more work required by the OS, which means higher CPU utilization; Throw a fragmented disk into the picture and well; if youâve read this, you get the picture. (Note that this concept applies to XP as well â it is not only a Vista thing). Point being, even with XP, Memory is inexpensive; load it up with 3 GB, more if you are running a 64 BIT version of the OS (32 bit OS will not recognize much over 2.9 or so).
