A spin-off from Kev's latest adventure...
The common syndrome of late-model Windows machines getting slower as time goes by got me thinking. Every noticeable slowdown I've encountered in recent years seemed to be due to either (1) indexing or (2) real-time AV monitoring. (By 'real-time', I mean at every file access, rather than at creation/modification time or scheduled scans.)
I gave up on indexing years ago (on Vista maybe?), although it seems to be getting harder to keep it disabled...seems like I need to check the setting every six months or so to make sure they haven't reset to default. Which leads us to...
I'm as paranoid as the next person (unless the 'next person' is Kev ), but I swore off RT monitoring after a few incidents where disabling it resolved "false-positive" problems that simply should never have happened. (E.g. preventing upgrade installs of known major-publisher apps.)
What I don't know is whether the virus signature database ever get "pruned". I'm wondering if every scan of a file is performed against every virus/variant signature that was downloaded since the OS was installed, even if the vulnerability it exploits no longer exists, and probably not in any optimal order. Over time, that can make every file access take longer.
Thoughts?