I’m not sure that you’re aware, but somehow your flagship application has become “Bloatware”.
Compared to the 3.x version, the last of the fast and stable releases… CIS 5.x is slow and bogs down every system I’ve installed it on and removed it from. It uses more GDI resources than Firefox and Winamp combined, and the package minus virus definitions is bordering 100 MB in size.
A firewall and antivirus need to be lean, fast and transparent to the system. The functionality needn’t suffer to achieve this, as the 3.x version proves.
I ask you take a hard look at yourself and consider the advantages of cutting off the fat. CIS feature and functionality hasn’t changed much between 3.x and 5.x, but its overall weight on a system has.
As it stands, I can no longer recommend Comodo Internet Security as a serious security tool. Not at least until 6.x changes my mind.
I disagree, comodo 4x was unstable and noticeably slow in my systems but 5x proved to be lightest, and compared to 3x much more refined, in my opinion Comodo sandbox is the main reason to use this software in blocking 0days malware.
I completely agree in regards to 4.x being even worse than 5.x. No argument there. And yes, the Sandbox is quite an excellent feature which I’ve advocated for years since Sandboxie hit the market.
But under all those “refinements” as you say, is something much more hideous than was in 3.x. I’m running the two side by side on almost identical machines, and every system benchmarking tool claims that the system running 5.x is performing miserably next to the system running 3.x.
Even with every application running set as Trusted, and each of the Firewall/Defense+/Antivirus set to disabled, 5.x is just absolutely killing the system.
I had been installing 3.x on customer’s laptops, all the way through the 4.x rollout, and recently decided to put 5.x on my USB stick that I use to install programs customer laptops. The very first 4 customers complained almost immediately, and I had to remove 5.x and replaced with 3.x.
I really can’t believe you don’t notice a crippling difference.
PS. Even the 5.x INSTALLER is bloated! It takes almost 20 seconds for the installer to actually display an install screen, while the 3.x installer loads in under 3 seconds. WTHH?
Edit: If you want to test for yourself, download 3.14.x from filehippo.
Not a bit of a performance… Nor on the 30 + machines i have running 5.3 most of which used also 3.x and 4… Don’t know what you have going on but from what i see with my own eyes on my end of the net theres not one bit of bloating. Running seemlessly and quick…
I have to admit I dont like the latest v5.3 at all, it caused a lot of problems for me on XPSP3, so I went back to 4.1 which I find runs as good as the 3x builds.
I did notice v5.3 uses more resources than 4.1 or earlier builds … and since I only use the firewall I dont really see why it should be more of a resource hog than before …
Is it possible that, besides the extra resources 5.3 uses (GDI, etc), something new in CIS’s low level driver is conflicting with other low level drivers, such as RAID or TrueCrypt System Drive Encryption drivers?
Edit: Btw, the machine i’m testing on currently is a Toshiba Laptop, 800 mhz / 1.7 ghz (low/high), Windows XP SP3 x86. I’m trying to get some numbers together as far as common benchmarks others can run to view similar results.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Comodo doesn’t tend to display much in the way of CPU usage, according to Windows’ Task Manager, even while the system is bogged down. This leads me to believe that CIS 5.x is masking its own CPU usage via low level drivers that don’t register to the Windows Performance Timers/API.
A large problem with this is when CIS is run on laptops with dynamic underclocking. Modern laptops will adjust their timing (clock multiplier) when CPU usage rises above 50%, making the core work harder. CIS’s failure to report its actual CPU usage will make a laptop feel sluggish for this reason.
??? You sure? Comodo version 5 only uses about 15 megs as a whole security suite. My netbook has worse in terms of processing power than your toshiba and comodo’s running just zippy on my computer.
Does make you wonder if some driver compatability issues were present to make it resource hungry, because until recently I was using V5 on an old Xp machine with only 384mb ram and noticed no bloat or slowdowns.
On that machine all other security programs that I tried did have noticably impact and that is the reason I chose Comodo in the very first place. Kind regards
But one can’t state that cis 5 is bad because nor running well on an underpowered laptop (i have myself a very small netbook, no way to make it run even cis 3).
The computer world makes each new software to be more and more space, hardware and ressource consuming, nothing new, but cis 5 runs without any problem on my 3.06 Mhz CPU but only 1 GB SDRAM outdated desktop.
Comodo 3.x was nice, 4.x bit rocky but got there, same with 5.0 (nice, sandbox lot better!), 5.3 even more improved… Fail to see how you work out that 3.x is better… But in your case it might be, not on the whole though.
Comodo is getting better and better with each release in my opinion :-TU
PS- Be interesting to find out more about the problems you are having, must be a conflict somewhere…
I don’t agree, Comodo 5 is as fast and can be trimmed to almost as lite as Comodo 3
I am testing 5.3 (Firewall & Defense+) on a virtualbox which runs on an old Centrino 1.7Ghz laptop with voltage/clock adjustment. The virtualbox runs a small web server and a resource intensive p2p program while the laptop runs at 600-800 Mhz and only user intervention causes it to jump higher. How’s that for underpowered ?
In regards to 5.3 being bloated – using a virtual machine I ran the installer which created a smaller MSI file; this is what I use for installing Comodo on my various systems.
I also deleted everything from the Comodo folder except for the following:
(Some antivirus files need to be unregistered to be removed, very easy with the autoruns utility)
Final folder size: 14 MB vs 10 MB for Comodo 3.
But Comodo 5 also has an option for unthemed UI which is great for remote desktop control (themes are very slow on remote desktop & VNC). And although I do like the looks of Comodo 3 better (especially the white icon), I can’t overlook the superior usability of Comodo 5 (for example, Comodo 5 displays the number of allow/deny rules in Defense+ custom settings)
I don’t know how CIS 3 was but CIS 5 is very good and something that comodo can release as stable version because it’s stable. I don’t see it as buggy but I might me wrong.
It hardly uses any ram or cpu for being a complete suit.
I run 5.3 firewall with D+ on a 650M CPU, 192M RAM notebook. It is the lightest and all round security solution I can find for my antique notebook; firewall, HIPS, cloud antivirus, sandbox and very few pop-ups.
(Actually, CIS 5.x can run with much less system resources without installing the AV module. In my past experiences, bugs in the AV module may caused problems and slow down my PCs. You may try uninstall the AV module to verify if that can solve your problem.)
Installation mode basically did the same thing as the Automatically trust files from trusted installers setting. You would enter installation mode and D+ would allow installer components to spawn child processes without giving you an alert. So during an installation, you wouldn’t get pummeled by alerts.
Since CIS now automatically recognizes installers, and has the above-mentioned feature, why do you need installation mode?
