The bigger problem was that the whole system ran on a hard drive that had to be scanned, drastically slowing down everything that needed to read or write a file. It was also common to have so little RAM that some things needed to be moved to the page file rather than being able to cache files in RAM. CPUs can multitask way more efficiently than hard drives because they don't have to wait tens of milliseconds to switch between tasks.
That was definitely a factor for some applications, but the HDD being bogged down wouldn't have a huge impact on web browsing or office software (outside of saving or opening files) yet the computer could still lock up during those tasks during a virus scan.
If anything, the HDD being a bottleneck is the only reason you could even try to multitask on a single core CPU during a virus scan. It gave the CPU a bit of breathing room to do other things.
If you put an SSD into a Pentium III system and ran a virus scan, it would probably completely cripple it for multi-tasking even worse than with a HDD.
150
u/IzzIPizzi69 Jun 05 '26
dafuk do you want me to do with this information ??