Why Does McAfee Antivirus Slow Down My PC?

McAfee is one of the most popular antivirus software used by the consumers as well as businesses. It protects your computer system/laptop/mobile phone and tablet from harmful online threats like viruses, Trojan horses, scams and frauds. It also comes up with parental controls that allow you to decide which websites your children can browse through.

Besides providing a higher level of security with the aforementioned exciting features, the antivirus may cause your PC to work a bit slow. This generally happens when you install and then use the antivirus on an old PC. That’s because an old PC might not satisfy the system requirements this antivirus needs; which ultimately results in slow performance of your computer system. Apart from this, there are a number of other reasons that slow down your PC. These reasons have been mentioned below:

Like any other software,McAfee antivirus also includes a huge database, including the definitions of viruses. This database also needs to be updated to prepare the antivirus for any upcoming virus that may occur in the future. To update this database, you need to download them from the internet. That’s what McAfee does automatically whenever it finds an update available. This doesn’t require much processor power, but it still needs a good bandwidth to download all those definitions.

The solution is of this problem is simply, disable the auto updates in McAfee antivirus settings. On the other hand, don’t forget to do this manually.

As aforementioned, McAfee antivirusscans your computer system automatically to keep it safe and secure from the viruses. Generally, this scan is scheduled to be done once in every week, but it doesn’t really waits even if it sees you working. And if the two heavy applications that require a lot of RAM and processor power, will work simultaneously, your device will definitely respond slowly.

To get rid of this problem, you can manually schedule the time of its auto scan or disable it completely. In the later case, don’t forget to do this manually after some period of time.

McAfee full system scan goes through each and every file resides on your computer system. This will obviously need a lot of time along with high processor power. It is recommended to schedule this while you are away or at night, when you hardly need your computer system.

Not only the McAfee antivirus, but all other software also requires a certain system specifications in order to work properly and run smoothly. So, it is advisable to check the required system specifications before you download and install a particular version of McAfee antivirus. The basic specifications required are as follows:

• 512MB RAM for Windows XP
• GB of RAM for Windows Vista
• 500MB of free space
• 1GHz processor

In general, we all agree with this fact that dealing with a little bit PC performance issue is better than letting the harmful viruses corrupt your system and important information.