MSE? You really don't want to do that. It's like trying to stop an artillery shell with wet tissues. Do the MS updates as they have updated viral definitions as well as security patches you should not do without. Slower but safer is definitely the way to go.

At least create a Guest account and browse using that, and disable javascript in your browser.

With a low end or old machine, turn off 'hardware acceleration' in your browser. Hardware acceleration for an older machine really will just make it work slower. Use the software acceleration choice.

And is such a resource hog.

and to slow down your machine to give users the impression that win8 is better.

Last XP update I did near crippled my machine. Went from a 28 sec boot time to a 4:18 boot time. They really want me to upgrade my OS.

I'm by no means an expert but have you looked at other programs that might be running in the background?  Do you have several tabs open in IE and are they updating the info?  Sorry if you have looked at these or if I'm way off the mark. 

Not my experience at all. In fact precisely the reverse. MSE slows everything down on XP compared to Avast. On my Win7 machines, it's not noticeable, I think because they have better hardware. 

So I don't want MSE on my system?

How do you do that in IE and Firefox?

iTunes is using 12K lately when playing a song. Far from a resource hog. I use an older version of iTunes.

Exactly!! This machine flies when no updates are applied.

No other programs running in the background except MSE. There is over 10 scvhost.exe programs running. Not sure if that's an issue. And I have four tabs open in IE, but they are not updating until I tell them to. The four tabs are Gmail, Facebook, MTBR, and Wincustomize.

Win7, 2gig RAM, 160gig drive - Hard drive could be struggling to read the music files while it's trying to manage the dynamic swap file.

Try defragging the hard drive and see if that helps, especially if you haven't done that since installing all the updates.

Set your swap file size to a fixed size if you can on Win7.  Don't know exactly how to do that on 7 and don't know how big to tell you to make it.

It's not going to make it an i7 but it might help.

The disk is 2 percent fragmented. I will defragment the drive, I doubt it helps.

Anyone know how to do that?

No. It's practically worthless.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/enabling-javascript.html

The two above who claim things slowed down are both on XP.

Irrelevant input.

The Winamp I use is v 2.9x .....because I skin it.

...and it's before it went to poo.

So what should I use? I want the lightest on resources free AV solution. I used AVG for years, it has become way to bloated. Avast is getting that way.

By the way Doc - those instructions do not work to disable Javascript in Firefox 24. There is no option under content to disable anything. After a quick Google search it looks like Mozilla has removed the option to disable Javascript.

I really don't know what people have against MSE, I have been using it since it first came out and have never had a virus or anything else on my PC.  It is also the only thing I use, nothing else.

Oh, and the results companies publish about anti-virus software and which is best, well lets just say I don't believe in them.

Agreed.  Some of those 'results' can be subjective not to mention that things change from month-to-month constantly.  While I will concede that certain iterations of the MSE client have been better/worse than others MS keeps updating the client software making it better.  The latest update to the MSE client came out just a few weeks ago.

For 'daily-driver protection' I too use MSE almost exclusively in conjunction with all MS published OS updates, the MS monthly "malware removal tool' as well as system-wide least privilege and only use tools such as my fovourite fast-scan cloud antimalware (Hitman Pro www.surfright.nl) and the heavy-hitting all purpose scanner from Emsisoft (www.emsisoft.com) as needed.

If at all possible can you start with a fresh OS install? It will take some time but install updates one at a time and test. Don't install any other software besides the OS.

Eventually ( if at all ) you will find the culprit. From there, do some research and see what the ramifications of not using that update will bring. I think you may be chasing ghosts if you don't.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/whats-the-best-size-for-the-pagefilesys-gigantic/d6b56634-c68a-47da-b8e8-eaecec820f3e?auth=1

With only 2 gig of RAM I guess I'd set it at 4 gig (4096 in both fields) but that's admittedly not a Win7-educated guess.