Better Safe Than Quick

At the end of last year, DW and I were looking to cut some expenses, and because our antivirus software was up for renewal in January, we looked to see if we could get a better deal on other software. We were paying more than $100 a year for protection and we were hoping to reduce that amount.

We saw that one of the competitors, another well-known antivirus software company, was offering the same sort of protection as our current AV company but at less than a third of the price. We did a line-by-line comparison of features and functions, and we couldn't discern any noticeable difference, so we dropped our old provider and signed up to the new one.

Our old AV provider wanted to keep us and offered to reduce the annual fee, but it was still more than the competitor. In a last-ditch effort, they offered a renewal for only $40 but weren't willing to match the $30 price of the competitor, so we bid them a fond farewell.

So far, the new software seems to behave like the old folks but with one major difference: my laptop has slowed to a crawl. Looking up Web sites, accessing files, and performing photo editing have all slowed down. It's as though the antivirus software is stopping everything at a gate, padding it down, and interrogating it before it lets anything through.

The biggest slowdown comes through working on my blog posts. Sometimes, the keyboard lags. Adding images to my posts takes at least a minute to upload; sometimes, longer. If I'm uploading several photos at once, such as for a Wordless Wednesday post, it takes forever.

When I click the Publish button, sometimes my screen goes blank and it can take ages for it to refresh and tell me that my post has queued up successfully. In that time, I worry that something will go wrong and I will lose the content.

I have tried to figure out a way to increase the speed at which the computer can operate but so far, I can't find a solution without turning off some of the functionality of the AV software, and I don't want to do that.

The MacBook that DW bought last year seems to handle the software without any slowdown, and I'm almost tempted to start using it, instead of our Windows laptop.

We'll see.

But when this subscription comes up for renewal, I might see if our old protection provider will offer us that $40 to come back. The extra 10 bucks is certainly worth the hassle of having to wait.