There is no way it could have ran decently with that many antivirus programs installed, if thats even possible now since some won't even install because it detects other programs installed already. Unless he confused malware programs for virus programs.
They were anti-viruses. There was an old install of Trend Micro, an old install of Kaspersky, an active copy of Avast and AVG. The owner had me keep Avast and remove the rest. After cleaning other OEM junkware she didn't want off the EEE PC was real fast.
It's obviously not too fast by any means lol but it performs a heck of a lot better now than it did when I first got it, and the owner is happy, and that's all that really matters here.
Reminds me of my old Gateway MT6730 laptop. Intel dual-core, 2GB max ram, couldn't upgrade it. Got it for free from a friend because the battery crapped out so I can't complain since I didn't pay for it. I ended up using it as an Ubuntu machine to try coding on until it finally blew up.
Lemme guess... From a power surge?
It's been about 3 years since I've had that laptop and I honestly don't remember. All I remember is I was streaming video and it sparked inside and never worked since. I tore it apart and salvaged what I could (made the processor into a cool little necklace, put it's hard drive into the hot-swap canister on the Beast, and the wifi card and RAM, and I gave the rest of the parts to my school's computer dept because they build cool stuff from old scrap pieces.