There is since a couple of week a big fight between my ADSL provider and me.

I have at home a 2 MB ADSL connection and since some weeks's I get not more then 0.5 MB. The provider has mention to me that my anti viruses and spyware cause the slow down of my speed.
Sounds really strange for me, as I have the problem on all three PC, on which I use differed anti viruses programs (Norton, McAfee and BitDefender).

Is there somebody who has similar problems? Wish to know if anti viruses can really slow down ADSL speed

Well if there is a virus or spy ware on your machine it can be accessing the internet and sending or receiving information and this would slow the connection down.

Anti-spyware/virus/adware applications do access the internet to download patches and updates however i dont think they would slow it down that much. One thing to do would be to run one machine only and find an internet speed test on google and test the speed and write it down, then on the same machine turn off the anti-virus *for a very short time only!* and do the test again, then turn the anti-virus etc.. back on to be safe. And see if there is a difference, if there is a big difference then that could be the issues but i doubt it. More likely is the fact of having three machines on the net each. Its normally unlikely to get the full 2mb anyway, ive got the same but i never get the full 2mb because broadband connections are shared in an area so if everyone in your street has the same broadband connection yours will be slower anyway, and if all your three machines are on the net together they will each get one third of the avaliable speed which would be about .5 - .75mb anyway. So try using one machine only if possible and test the speed, it might be faster.

If there is no difference in speed for either of those methods do a virus scan and if that comes up clean phone them again and tell them everything youve done and say your sure its not a problem with your machines. It could be a damaged line or something.

I have a 1MB connection, and I am running Norton Antivirus, Firewall and a host of other stuff. My brother is sat next to me playing on xBox Live in the middle of a game, and I am running MSN Messenger and a few connections in Gaim. We are also behind a hardware firewall. Using various sites, I have got an average connection speed over the last few minutes of 870KB, which I don't think is that bad. Firewall software does not slow your connection down noticeably now. In the old days of dial-up it made a difference, but now it doesn't really.

Take shadowx's suggestions and run as many free tests as you can find and try disabling your firewall and antivirus temporarily to see if there is a high difference. You are probably behind a router, so if you still have a ADSL modem, try using that to connect directly and see if there is a difference. This way you should be able to isolate the problem.

If its a decent antivirus you shouldn't have any problems. I notice more of a slowdown with some firewall programs, only cause they're monitoring my network so heavily.

I agree with the above, search on google for "internet speed test" or something like that to find out what your bandwidth connection actually is. Try it with your antivirus running, and then without. Just to compare the difference. If you notice a difference, then there ya go, problem solved.

This could be because I simply loathe Norton Internet Security and because I can prove it adds an extra 5 mins to my computer's startup time, but I'm pretty sure it slows down your ADSL connection. I have a 24Mbps ADSL2+ connection, and it slows down to a trickle if I enable Norton Internet Security.
But this could be something other than the Anti-virus. Probably a slow firewall.

Before I used Norton, I used ZoneAlarm. I had no problems at all with it: it didn't slow startup, my Internet Connection was extremely fast and from tests, it did better than Norton.

I haven't used McAfee or BitDefender, but from the reviews I've read, BitDefender should be faster than McAfee and Norton. But if you're going to buy BitDefender, I strongly recommend you check out ZoneAlarm first.

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