Does It Really Cause A Slowdown?

[Dark Auro]

I've heard before that having a virus scan or firewall while running in the background while playing a game will really slow it down and cause frame rate drops? Is this true? I have Avast, McAfee Virus, and Firewall running while I play games. Should I really disable them? Do they really slow down performance? I'm not sure if this matters, but my specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 3000
1GB PC2700 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800.
Hope you guys can help. Thanks.

 

[blahblahblah]

A virus scanner should only cause slow downs if it is actively scanning for viruses. A virus scanner won't cause any problems if it is in passive mode.

A firewall should't cause any problems at all. You should leave your virus scanner and firewall on at all times.