Warning: This is a subjective and slightly philosophical post - My Personal Viewpoint - Feel Free to Disagree or Just Ignore

What resources does a program use, how do you measure them, does it mean anything?

Research, software testing, subjective viewpoints of the user all present challenges to giving expert opinion.

I received an interesting and valuable comment on my AVG 8 Free post (NEW - AVG Anti Virus 8 FREE - Quick Review) from mulligrub:

Good review but a few questions.

The 2 biggest pluses for AVG free in the past are:

1. Free &;

2. Very low overhead - doesn’t use much system resources in day to day operation

The negatives include:

Not the fastest when scanning

Only daily upadtes

Outdated User Interface (looks like that has been addressed)

No Spyware, rootkit, spam protection (Spyware included in AVG8)

So if we are getting more (spyware scanning) in a flashier package
still for free the only achillies heel I can see will be the resource
usage

have you compared what level of resources it is using now?

Does the user experience ‘feel’ slower?

I am keen to know before recommending to family and friends and will test for myself too

Cheers

Well firstly thanks to mulligrub for the comment, and secondly thanks for sparking my interest to write this post!

I felt a more detailed answer and explanation is required, far more than just a comment reply on the original post. This is because it gets into some of the basic philosophy and policy I have tried to put in place for this blog.

A bit of background information is relevant to explain where I am coming from:

When I first decided to start this blog I was keen that it should provide information in a way that was a bit different to some of the other blogs in this area. I wanted to give readers a bit more detail in order to help them with decision making in terms of whether it was worth their time and effort to try a particular program or utility. The idea was to help with the decision making process not to make the decision and say this is “best” or don’t use something because it performs badly in some way or another. That I want to write about something, a program, a tip or some advice, means that I feel it is worth some effort and will be useful to the reader.

I was also keen not to get into the position of being overly judgmental on the merits of any particular item of free software against another. In particular I was very aware that I would never have the time to carry out proper comparative testing, so any opinion I could ever give would be subjective and based on a very few available facts.

It is my background as an engineer and researcher/scientist that makes me cautious to provide opinion without proper testing. I am more comfortable with giving my personal and very subjective viewpoint. The reader can value that, or not, based on their opinion of my posts.

To understand where I am coming from a little more information. I am a Civil Engineer by profession and my work over the past 10 years has involved me in research and “high level” consultancy into the performance of infrastructure assets (highway assets - that is anything that is built as part of the highway infrastructure - roads, bridges, tunnels, drainage, lighting, signs, barriers, signaling systems, etc.) and into the development of systems to manage them which includes developing software tools. Therefore, I hope I am in position to talk with some expertise on research/testing and subjective views/perception.

My approach is therefore from this point of view when asked particular questions such as:

1. Have you compared what level of resources it is using now?
2. Does the user experience ‘feel’ slower?

Question 1 raises several points regarding research/testing:

To “scientifically” measure resources to compare the two versions of AVG (or any two or more software utilities) would require defining a detailed test procedure that was, as far as possible, exactly the same for both versions. It would also require to properly test all the various working aspects of the software over a range of conditions, hardware and operating environments, some of which may use more or less of the defined resources to be evaluated than the other, this would include -

What resources are important - What difference would a limit on one or more resource in the test set up make to the results eg slow CPU, small amount of RAM, slow FSB, slow disk drives, etc.

I could raise a lot of other “variables” that could effect the results and opinion but I hope you can see the difficulty.

Furthermore from the ProReviewer point of view, I only currently have the ability to test under an XP OS environment on a couple of PCs, so I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the software I was reviewing at the level of detail required to carry out proper detailed comparative testing, even if I had the time.

Many of the professional PC magazines cover this area fairly well but even with these you can see there has to be limits to their testing methods. They can’t test all possible combinations of software, hardware and operating systems.

Question 2 is also very interesting because it raises the question of subjectivity:

Here I am happy to give MY subjective viewpoint, this is what I do in the “What is the Proreviewer Experience” section of my review posts. What you must understand is that subjective means that is how I perceive the software.

Again I feel I need to write a quick note on subjectivity.

If you open a program and it is up and running in a couple of seconds you are probably happy. If it takes a minute you won’t be. Or is that really true, if it takes a minute but it is an autostart program do you really notice? Maybe yes - maybe no.

If you run your PC 24/7 and have an Antivirus program set to scan your system at 2.00am in the morning when you are asleep until 6.00am do you care if it takes 4 hours. If you only scan your system in the brief periods you turn your computer on and it slows everything down then obviously you will care a lot!

If your Antivirus program “realtime” scanning of files (as they are opened by an application) has an impact of say 0.1 second when a file opens do you care? Probably not.

However if you have say desktop search software scanning thousands of files for content then the 0.1 second per file has a very real impact on system performance. Now you really do care.

Have you noticed how when you need to open a document and print it, or go to a website for some directions to a place when you are already late leaving seems to take forever?

I hope you can see that your subjective view of a program is dependent on many factors but principally how it effects your experience and what you are trying to accomplish.

Congratulations to anyone who has stayed awake long enough to read this far into the post .

Feel free to tell me what you think just remember:

A couple of quotes to put things in context:

There are no stupid questions - just stupid answers!

——————————————————————–

A man is getting along on the road to
wisdom when he begins to realize
that his opinion is just an opinion.

——————————————————————–

One accurate measurement is worth
a thousand expert opinions.

——————————————————————–

What Other Relevant Posts are There?

NEW - AVG Anti Virus 8 FREE - Quick Review

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