Posted on January 27th, 2009 by Barry Collins

Kaspersky causes Windows 7 slowdown

When even Linus Torvalds is heaping sardonic praise on Windows 7, you know Microsoft must be doing something right. But the gloss was definitely starting to come off for my colleague Stuart Turton and I over the past week or so.

For some unfathomable reason, Word 2007 was really starting to struggle – letters would appear on screen an annoying second or so after you typed them, and scrolling through long documents produced more jerks than an X-Factor audition. Not an ideal scenario for harassed journalists on press week.

Word’s not usually the first application to exhibit performance problems. If your processor or memory are being pushed to breaking point, you’d normally expect 3D games or DVD playback to be suffering from the heebie-jeebies first – but both those applications were fine on our systems. A performance widget on my desktop also confirmed that the processor and 3GB of memory in my laptop weren’t being unduly burdened by Word, either.

A quick straw poll of the office revealed that only Stu and I were suffering from Word Arthritis – with the rest of the team quietly assuming there was actually nothing wrong with our PCs and that it was just the news team having a deadline-induced meltdown.

After ruling out everything from Aero Glass to graphics drivers it finally dawned upon us – we were the only two running the Windows 7 trial version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus. A quick uninstall later, and Word was back to its normal responsive self on both our systems. What’s more the odd juddering Aero Glass animation and occasional problem with saving files to our office network appears to have disappeared, too.

We’re not going to be too hard on Kaspersky: this is a free prototype security suite running on a beta operating system. Bugs are to be expected. And unlike AVG, at least Kaspersky hasn’t got the brass neck to charge for protection of a beta OS.

But although we probably shouldn’t say it, we’re rather enjoying the liberation of being free from the constant nagging and annoying slowdown of our Russian minder. Can we live without security software on the office network? Probably only until our IT manager notices.

Tags: avg, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Windows 7, Word 2007

Posted in: Windows 7

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13 Responses to “ Kaspersky causes Windows 7 slowdown ”

David Wright Says:
January 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am
“we’re rather enjoying the liberation of being free from the constant nagging and annoying slowdown of our Russian minder”

Interesting, is Kaspersky taking over from UAC on the nagging front?

I run Kaspersky ISS 2009 on my Vista machine and I haven’t seen it nag once yet… :-S
muck Says:
January 27th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I’m running Kaspersky on my Win 7 and have noticed slowdown on IE tab openings, wonder if it’s the same reason.. cheers for the tip off
Kevin Says:
January 27th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I tried Kaspersky a month ago, and had it physically removed from my install! Bloody awful software, completely locked my connection out to the internet. And yes, I followed just about every course of action I could.

Never had a problem with any other product before, so I’m sticking with Sophos.
Matt Says:
January 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 and had AVG free installed, which still works in Windows 7. I did an update and a scan last night….
Sam Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I second that Matt; installed AVG Free edition and runs fine, updates ok with no W7 or Office 2007 issues found
David Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Try using NOD32. I have been using the BETA 4 that is pretty much v3 with bells as far as I can see. Anyway, been using that for a while and had no problems

Google NOD32 beta.
John Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Who cares about a slow down, as long as you are well protected.
I ran the Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware test file from http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
AVG allowed me to download the double zipped ARCHIVEe and detected it only after I unzipped and tried to install.
Kasperskie intercepted the attempted download of the double zipped file at point blank range with a red warning, advising me to terminate the download.
It the went in to detail saying “The following error was encountered:
The requested object is INFECTED with the following virus: EICAR-Test_File”.
“Please contact your service provider if you consider it uncorrect”.
It doesn’t take a lot of working out as, especially as eicar advised that good scanners will detect the virus’ in the single zip ARCHIVEe and may even in the double zip ARCHIVEe.
Jaak Says:
January 31st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
It is a good thing beta issues get found while running a machine through its paces. For testing real live behaviour, one tries to load and do as much as one would on a non-beta test machine. I thought it was not wise to use this beta loaded with other betas as if this was a production machine. A reviewer can write up findings in a production machine, and do screenshots on the beta machine, and the beta machine should have access to a dedicated virtual server for sharing data ‘accessible to same reviewer’ so that major issues in beta do not spread to production environment.
The beta is in public too. I wonder how many betas are used on machines in daily use running real daily life tasks, rather than for finding bugs and annoyances.
For testing, I use a non-critical machine that won’t set me back if things go poof.
Kind regards, Jaak.
Paul Godfrey Says:
February 14th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I have certainly encountered the delay when typing into web forms. It is not consistent, only a few web sites suffer from it.
Rick Toronto Says:
April 9th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
No problems with Windows 7 – build 7077; however, there have been certain files once downloaded that have caused Kasp preview to crash and require a system restart.

Quickly had to stop the download (FF restarted automatically – system crash again when file was downloaded).

System again crashed when a 120M error log was being sent to Kasp for evaluation.
Ribeiro Portugal Says:
May 3rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Running Build 7100. Absolutely no problems with Kaspersky.
Chris Says:
September 17th, 2009 at 6:33 am
I had the same problem with Kaspersky and suffered painfully slow and non responsive Windows 7.
Uninstalled the piece of junk and Win 7 runs like a dream.
I will never use Kaspersky again, I don’t give a sh*t if it’s beta, Microsoft should remove them off their list of recommended av providers.
Steve Webster Says:
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:23 am
I too have just purchased a superfast PC with Windows 7 and it was reduced to a snails pace after installing Kapersky Internet Security 2010. My PC has an Intel i7 processor and 8mb of memory and it was running slower than my old PC which had an Intel Celeron and 512mb of memory!
I contacted the PC supplier who told me that the problem would definitely be Kapersky and that I should remove it immediately. Bingo! Superfast PC once more! He recommemded downloading and installing Microsofts own free program and so far I have no complaints.