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Change your software

When Dr. Vijay Amaranth of Doctor’s Club, NIMS, installed the latest McAfee antivirus software, his Pentium dual-core laptop slowed down alarmingly. “Start up took ages. Even launching IE took a few seconds. I tried everything: scanned th e system, rebooted, defragmented the disk, cleaned the registry, and reinstalled the OS... Nothing helped, until I uninstalled several nonessential features in the McAfee bundle.”

Manufacturers push expensive upgrades down our throats faster than you can say George Moore. And for what? Most PC users do little more than browse the Net, use MS Office, play music and watch movies.

The vast increases in RAM and processor speed do not launch Microsoft Word or IE much faster than in 1995. Blame “feature-rich”, bloated, RAM-hungry, processor draining software such as the latest fatsos from Windows, Adobe and Nero. Harassed PC users are fighting back, choosing lean upstarts over fat marquee products. The 1970s philosophy of writing lean code is back. Nod 32, an antivirus software written in assembly code, is punishing McAfee and Symantec with its frugal CPU use. Foxit Reader is a smaller, faster and increasingly popular alternative to Adobe Reader.

Utorrent, the astonishingly small BitTorrent client written in C++, barely registers on the CPU resource radar unlike Azureus, the Java-based, CPU-freezing client. VLC and Media Player Classic are lighter and support more codecs than Windows Media Player does. Unlike Winamp, Foobar’s plug-ins do not weigh down the CPU.

Some of the leaner alternatives are actually carved-up versions of popular programs. When Nero went from being a small and efficient Burning ROM to a megalith of nine programs, beleaguered PC users took matters into their own hands. They hacked away the nonessential bits, creating Nero Micro and Nero Lite. Nero Lite and Nero Micro are of course illegal. But judging by their popularity on torrent sites, resource-thrifty programs have found a niche. The obese offspring of Symantec, McAfee, Adobe, Nero and Windows had better slim down.

For now, when your PC Slows. Down. Stops. and Goes. Like. This. Sentence, change software rather than upgrade hardware.

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