Limited PC Resources, Need Light/Lean Antivirus Advice

I've just restored an 8-year old PC (850MHz AMD Athlon). It's running XP and is maxed out with 512MB RAM. I'm trying to strike a balance between free memory and antivirus performance. Right now, I'm running Avast (which I runon all my systems), but it's eating up about 90MB RAM running at least 5 different processes:

aswUpdSv.exe
ashWebSv.exe
ashServ.exe
ashMaiSv.exe
ashDisp.exe

How can I optimize Avast's performance, if at all?

Is there an alternative Antivirus program that's lighter on resources but comparable in performance?

Thanks in advance!

Chuck

 

Avira is quite light on resources, and i ve just checked mine and Kaspersky is using 22MB(ish)

Avira http://majorgeeks.com/Avira_AntiVir_Personal_-_Free_Antivirus_d955.html



Q

 

Just currios what is your virtual memeory at sometimes you need to make it larger.

 

My Avira is using only 9MB at the moment.
And with only 512MB RAM on XP, raising your virtual memory as suggested would help.

 

Virtual memory is the standard 1.5x RAM. In my case, it's 768MB.

 

I've installed Avira and boosted my virtual to 1024MB. So far, so good!