How to survive without an antivirus in Windows and boost it [XP/Vista/7]
February 7th, 2009
If you recently bought a computer with an antivirus, you will notice a poor performace, especially reading files. And if you have an old PC and uninstall the antivirus, in a clean installation of Windows XP, the PC becomes very fast!
We will see that with four things known, we can maintain a PC without antivirus, and enjoy a better speed, sometimes even several times more …
Needed software (only one):
- Extract the autoruns.exe file from the .ZIP, and always leave it in the desktop.
- Open autoruns.exe
- There are many sections, first we look at the Logon section, click on it
- In the Logon section we have all the software that starts when your PC starts, you can disable everything except explorer.exe, userinit.exe and rdpclip.exe, if you prefer you can keep checked or unchecked the MSN messenger, audio, etc… anyway we can always re-activate it
- Here is the key: now in the program go to the top menu and click on Entry and set the Verify Code Signatures . Close Autoruns, and re-open it
- Now it will take longer to open because it will check the programs signed by Microsoft, to see if they have been modified or not.
- We put the in the Everything section, you will see (Not verified) in all third-party programs (Drivers Sound Nero, graphics drivers, antivirus) ignore or uncheck them if you are sure that can be dangerous.
- And now the most important part, verify all files that have as Publisher “Microsoft Windows (blah blah …)” they will be (Verified) , if any of them has a (Not Verified) it may be a virus or have some kind of rootkit. We must turn it off if it is not a critical file, and the best option is to search it in another Windows original distribution (Home, Vista x64, 7 …) and replace
- if you could not replace it because it’s in use, we can download an Ubuntu Live CD for example, and then make the substitution
- Finally we have checked everything, once we have a clean boot without unnecessary processes and potential threats, we must open the task manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to View> Select Columns and add the columns of “I/O Reading”, here the only process that might make about 3 reads / writes per second is lsass.exe or sometimes csrss.exe
If you have any questions, you can answer in the comments.
