One of the most common things users do to try and keep their computer running as smooth as possible, is keep control over which programs start with Windows. Having just a few memory or processor hungry programs loading into the system tray on boot can have an adverse affect on the performance of your computer. One of the most common applications that will load with Windows and stay resident in the background while the system is on, will be your chosen antivirus software. Have you ever wondered which are the lightest antivirus packages available and which ones don’t do so well on memory usage?

It’s maybe not such a major issue for newer computers these days having an antivirus which isn’t especially memory efficient because they often come equipped with 4GB or more of RAM. But if your computer isn’t the latest and greatest, using a package which might possibly be eating hundreds of Megabytes of system memory could slow your computer down considerably at inopportune moments. To find out just how much memory gets used by running antivirus software, we’ve decided to gather together a mixture of 25 popular commercial and free antivirus packages to see how they perform.

How We Tested

As you might expect, testing an antivirus product for its memory usage is certainly not an exact science because the program is never standing still and nearly always doing something in the background. A problem with taking memory readings is there are several different numbers you can look at.
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Many people still use a traditional email client on their Windows computer to view, write and organize emails instead of online webmail services such as those offered by Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail, Google GMail or Yahoo Mail. The two most popular Windows mail clients are most likely Windows Live Mail from the free Windows Essentials 2012 and Microsoft’s Outlook from their Office suite, Outlook is especially popular where business use is concerned.

If you allow HTML emails in your client, you will of course receive emails with clickable hyperlinks inside which can be clicked on, and the link is automatically opened in your default web browser. There is quite an annoying issue that can commonly occur in a mail client which is when you click on a link in an email, it doesn’t load the page in the web browser but instead throws up an error that the URL couldn’t be opened. For Microsoft Outlook users, you could get a popup error that says:

General failure. The URL was: “http://www.website.com/”. Application not found

For people who are using Windows Live Mail, you’ll get a somewhat different error that might say:

http://www.website.com/ Application not found

Other email clients such as The Bat! can also be affected by this problem, although Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird seem not to suffer the same issue

Like most files in Windows, a hyperlink should be associated with an application that can open and view it. These errors occur when that association gets broken due to corrupt registry entries pointing to the wrong or a non existent program to open the HTTP or HTTPS link. Installing or uninstalling web browsers are the most common cause of this problem. The ways to fix the issue can be very simple, here’s a few solutions for you to try out.
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