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A friend has a very old Toshiba laptop running windows 7 SP1, 32 bit, 4 GB of ram. He really does not use it so he doesn't need a newer one, and it's surprisingly fast for an old laptop.

He brought it to me to install few games for him, noticed that node32 he has is a 2011 version so I removed it and installed Avast, nothing serious was found when I scanned the laptop, but I did notice that it took a toll on the laptop's performance.

I'm tempted to uninstall it, this laptop survived years without an antivirus, I don't want to kill because of one. I'm looking for:

  • A free antivirus
  • Very lightweight, works on very old 32 bit laptops, like designed specifically for them
  • Not web based like Panda, it has to work fully offline, the internet in my country is so slow.
  • It does not have to be perfect, you get what you pay for, I just want some sort of a protection for an old rarely used laptop. I know that a bad AV is like no AV, but still, good AVs won't run smoothly on this laptop anyhow.
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    Were it not for games, I'd be tempted to recommend a light-weight Linux distro, there are some such especially for old machines :)
    – Izzy ♦
    Dec 19, 2018 at 21:40
  • @Izzy I know man, I'm a linux user myself, and btw all his games run fine on Wine, I checked, but he's a windows user and rarely use it so even if I convince him to switch and even if I taught him to use Linux, his laptop is gonna be shut down most of the time, it's not worth the effort and time
    – Lynob
    Dec 19, 2018 at 21:45
  • @Izzy He wanted this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor:_Rise_of_the_Middle_Kingdom and this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_I.G.I. they run on wine
    – Lynob
    Dec 19, 2018 at 21:47
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    if there's not much data exchange with the world, it's worth switching off the antivirus and only run manual scans periodically. of course it requires user discipline in case an USB stick will be inserted. it has to be scanned manually, everytime
    – AnonymousLurker
    Dec 20, 2018 at 13:32
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    @AnonymousLurker, I wanted to do that, but not sure that he's the type of guy who remembers to run scans periodically :)
    – Lynob
    Dec 20, 2018 at 13:51

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