My specs:
i7 3820
16GB RAM
GTX680 2GB
C Drive - SSD Verbatim 2.5" 128GB
Secondary HDD - regular 1TB HDD
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate - regularly updated
Security:
Main Security Program: BitDefender Internet Security - fully updated
Second Opinion Programs that are NOT Active and do NOT cause conflicts with BitDefender:
Malware Bytes
Super Antispyware
Hitman Pro
^ All fully updated. all of them set to manual updating and none of them are active or do any realtime protection so they don't conflict with BitDefender.
Browsers I use: Google Chrome and FireFox - with no ******, both have AdBlock Plus and BitDefender's extension active
I take very good care of my system and I've been running the same installation of Windows 7 without any problems or malware issues.
However, there is one issue I couldn't pinpoint the source of, a strange lag of the explorer process when my internet connection would slow down to a crawl or die out, in order to resume working normally I have to unplug the ethernet cable and after a minute at most or usually less when whatever it is that's looking for a connection and lagging up my entire system, right down to making opening folders seem like opening web sites on a 56k connection realizes there is no more internet connection so everything resumes functioning normally.
The only two ways to get out of this state are to unplug the ethernet cable or hope the connection would fix itself.
I had a very similar issue before I got BitDefender Internet Security and it would usually occur when AVAST, which I had before would download and install updates.
Regardless, I decided to check my system for malware with the following:
Super Anti Spyware - Free version
Malware Bytes - Full version
Hitman Pro - evolution period, I plan on buying a license for it too
Combo Fix - didn't find anything, just deleted my Chrome settings which wasn't a big deal
All of them gave me a perfect clean bill of health, except Hitman Pro which did detect some malware that I got rid of immediately.
So for the most part, aside from some tracking cookies my system is clean and well maintained and performs amazingly well when the slowdown/lag doesn't occur.
In order to make sure it wasn't a hardware related issue I booted up in safe mode without networking and saw my system working absolutely flawlessly.
Using or booting up the computer without an ethernet cable plugged in also yielded perfect results with the system functioning absolutely flawlessly for hours on end.
Yet despite all that I still had to deal with the terribly annoying lag when my system was connected to the internet and my connection would start dying or slowing down to a crawl at least 2-3 times a day.
Yesterday I finally decided to disable BitDefender's auto update because I remembered that I had a imilar issue with AVAST's updates before I got BitDefender and strangely enough, the lag didn't occur until hours later I re-enabled auto update just to see what would happen.
I disabled it again and sure enough I could use my system perfectly for hours.
The auto update feature is still disabled, however I noticed that when I download an update manually by clicking the download button if the update is too big the lag starts to happen and it gets worse as the download for the update progresses, it gets especially bad right after the download has finished when I assume BitDefender is installing the update or something.
It takes a couple minutes for things to resume working normally, however now I see this happening only and only when I update BitDefender, so it's safe to assume that it somehow overloads my connection with its update process and I'm not sure if I'm using the correct term here, but it seems to be causing an accidental DDOS attack or some such which causes my entire system to lag and the connection to die.