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Of these five I only have the firewall enabled on my Windows 7 desktop. And that only because I can’t be bothered to look into some issues with interdependencies when you disable the Windows firewall. (Can’t recall what exactly now.)

I don’t think the firewall adds anything significant to the startup time; it is just one of the dozens of services that start automatically.

Then, for many people an antivirus program may also be useful. Would that add 5 to 10 seconds to the startup time of a modern machine?

For the other 3—anti-rootkit, anti-spyware, keyboard scrambler— why do you think they are necessary for every user of Windows?



> I don’t think the firewall adds anything significant to the startup time

Think how long iptables takes to load, plus installing a couple of system hooks to detect unknown programs and a GUI window to warn about them. This stuff only takes a long time to load if you're loading in a huge framework and JIT at startup - startup times are very quick for C++ programs using Win32 API calls or WTL.

I'd say anti-virus and anti-spyware are mostly treated as one these days (anti-malware) - with things like Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton Internet Security, etc. I use MSE and it sure as hell doesn't add 5 seconds to startup. It doesn't even add 1. But perhaps it's because I'm running a 'post-modern' machine with an SSD...




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