Engine testing and antivirus

[Kempelen]

I use my main computer to surft the web, read email and typical personal tasks. When I don't use the computer I launch my tournament manager to test my engine. Could a resident antivirus be counterproductive for engine testing?
I used to had a on-demand antivirus, I mean, only running when I executed it and dont let it to be resident.... but after a bad experience I am considering a normal instalation. What are your experiences with antivirus?

[Spock]

A good resident anti-virus will have no effect on your engine testing. The good ones consume only tiny amount of system resources.

[jesper_nielsen]

I use my main computer to surft the web, read email and typical personal tasks. When I don't use the computer I launch my tournament manager to test my engine. Could a resident antivirus be counterproductive for engine testing?
I used to had a on-demand antivirus, I mean, only running when I executed it and dont let it to be resident.... but after a bad experience I am considering a normal instalation. What are your experiences with antivirus?

I my experience, the thing to look out for is the scheduled runs. Like setting up a full scan to run once a day.

When a full scan is running, it greatly interferes with running chess engines. But otherwise i have had no problems with it.

I guess it also depends upon what priority you run the engines with. I always run them at low priority, so I can still do "stuff" on the computer at the same time. And this of course makes the engines more sensitive to other tasks running.

Kind regards,
Jesper

[swami]

AVG I heard takes up lots of memory.

BitDefender is the best one out there.

It doesn't take up too much memory when scanning unlike most of the other anti-virus softwares, It's reliable and fast.

[Graham Banks]

I use my main computer to surft the web, read email and typical personal tasks. When I don't use the computer I launch my tournament manager to test my engine. Could a resident antivirus be counterproductive for engine testing?
I used to had a on-demand antivirus, I mean, only running when I executed it and dont let it to be resident.... but after a bad experience I am considering a normal instalation. What are your experiences with antivirus?

I my experience, the thing to look out for is the scheduled runs. Like setting up a full scan to run once a day.

When a full scan is running, it greatly interferes with running chess engines. But otherwise i have had no problems with it.

I guess it also depends upon what priority you run the engines with. I always run them at low priority, so I can still do "stuff" on the computer at the same time. And this of course makes the engines more sensitive to other tasks running.

Kind regards,
Jesper

Yep - disable automatically scheduled scans. Run them manually when you're not testing.

[Spock]

Yep - disable automatically scheduled scans. Run them manually when you're not testing.

100% agree.

[Guenther]

I use my main computer to surft the web, read email and typical personal tasks. When I don't use the computer I launch my tournament manager to test my engine. Could a resident antivirus be counterproductive for engine testing?
I used to had a on-demand antivirus, I mean, only running when I executed it and dont let it to be resident.... but after a bad experience I am considering a normal instalation. What are your experiences with antivirus?

I always completely stop all AV activities and unload all programs
except the necessary ones from the OS. The test machine isn't connected
to the internet anyway, but sometimes it is used in my local network
when no tests are running.

Guenther

[Ron Murawski]

AVG I heard takes up lots of memory.

BitDefender is the best one out there.

It doesn't take up too much memory when scanning unlike most of the other anti-virus softwares, It's reliable and fast.

I use AVG: memory usage is acceptable. You need to do a bit of fiddling with the advanced settings to get it right. The default settings are a horror.

I recently posted a list of free antivirus products here:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/index.p ... ead&id=344

Ron

[yanquis1972]

if im going to do say an overnight analysis, i usually simply switch on gamebooster (free program), close everything but the GUI & engine, then pause AVG (which is always scanning, and tbh im not sure it uses any significant amount of CPU, but why not pause it i figure). the speedup over just running the engine in the OS as-is is significant, tho a lot of this is probably because i have a very fat customized windows 7, with 2 docks, widgets, gadgets, twitter, feeds etc running. i havent tested what the speedup is but its probably around 15% or so.

perhaps none of that is due to AVG, but i would highly recommend gamebooster if u dont have, v simple & quick to use program that shuts down all most unnecessary windows processes & applications then starts them all back up with a single click.

[Ron Murawski]

if im going to do say an overnight analysis, i usually simply switch on gamebooster (free program), close everything but the GUI & engine, then pause AVG (which is always scanning, and tbh im not sure it uses any significant amount of CPU, but why not pause it i figure).
...

Hi John,

I advise you to go into AVG advanced configuration and shut off the constant scan. Constant scanning can eventually wear out your hard drive! Once your entire machine has been scanned once, it is enough to have AVG resident and check all programs/files as they are accessed. Specifically, look at 'Scheduled scan' and change it to 'Run at a specific time interval' and 'Every selected day in Month', then choose a time and day. That way you will only have to worry about the scan on one day per month. If you are confident you don't have a virus you can uncheck the 'Enable this task' in the 'Scheduled scan' settings. I use a couple of non-resident products (AdAware, SpyBot Search & Destroy, and ClamWin) and do full scans perhaps once a month.

AVG has the lightest touch of the antiviruses that I've tried. It does not seem to bog down my machine at all. The only slowness is when I'm installing new software (*very* slow!) or browsing the Internet (slightly slow).

I will look into GameBooster. Thanks!

Ron