Jim Rossman: Don’t bog down your PC with extra antivirus protection

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Last week I received an email from a reader that included the longest explanation of a problem that I can recall. I’m going to edit it way down for inclusion here.

“I am a 75-year-old, semi-tech-savvy, retired female. I know enough to trouble-shoot simple things, but when it gets too technical, I get overwhelmed. I was having a lot of issues with my internet being slow, but everything was working."

She bought a new faster laptop, but to no avail. She had Frontier internet and updated her service to a 2-gigabit connection with a new router. Still things were slow.

She installed a new Eero mesh Wi-Fi router and still had very slow internet and was unable to reach some websites at all.

Here’s where the email gives me a clue, “The only other thing I can think of on my end is that when I got the new laptop, I downloaded Zone Alarm virus and firewall protection. I’m afraid to disconnect my Zone Alarm to see if that helps for fear of someone hacking me while it’s off. Also, I have Zone Alarm on all my computers but have never had this issue until the new laptop was set up.”

She asked if I knew of a person or service I might trust to come and take a look.

I saw the red flag immediately. I don’t recommend people use a third-party antivirus or anti-malware software suite for full-time protection.

Microsoft’s built-in Defender is more than capable of protecting your PC. I’d also pair that with specific malware scanning software like Malwarebytes, that I would only use if I encountered an issue and suspected malware had creeped in. I would not let any third-party software suite get between my computer and the internet.

Anything that is examining all the internet traffic in and out of your PC is going to slow things down. Defender is the best at real-time protection with minimal disruption. Using Defender in concert with any other software suite is going to slow things way down.

You might disagree with me, and if you’re happy with whatever security software you pay for and use, I’m not going to say you’re wrong.

I just advised this reader to uninstall Zone Alarm and see if things got better.

She answered back, “Thank you for your advice. I uninstalled Zone Alarm and everything seems to be working fine now! I’m so relieved!”

Lastly, this is not a knock on Zone Alarm. If you want to take the time to disable Defender and go with Zone Alarm or McAfee or Norton, I wish you well. I’d just recommend against two full-time security suites scanning the same PC.

Whatever software you use to protect your PC, do keep it up-to-date with the latest virus definitions.