Obviously, the most important feature of an antivirus program is the ability to catch viruses — but it’d also be nice if the program was fast and lightweight, too. The team over at Soluto put together a graph that shows how many seconds some anti-viruses add to your boot time.
Our favourite anti-virus program, Avast, comes in second place for longest boot time, which may not be ideal for some of you. Microsoft Security Essentials was our favourite for a little while and it doesn’t add much time, but it hasn’t been doing so well at the actual virus catching.
The paid options like Norton and McAffee come out on top, but if you’re trying to shave that boot down to a smaller number, Kaspersky or ESET may fit the bill. Hit the link to read more.
Anti-Virus Average Time in Boot [Soluto on Facebook]
Comments
12 responses to “Anti-Virus Boot Times Compared: Paid Options Come Out On Top”
To be honest, they make up their shortfalls elsewhere. You couldn’t pay me to use norton or mcaffee
Lol, I agree. I remember McAfee came preinstalled on my i7 3770k last year and I was soooo scared when it was running so horribly slow, just opening my computer and folders. Then realised it was McAfee just randomly scanning everything I opened up, as soon as i disabled it, it went crazy fast. AVAST4LIFE.
Norton used to be terrible, but has improved significantly. Still not back to the brilliance of Norton 20 years ago though.
But I don’t use Norton. I use Eset
wouldn’t mind seeing some stats here, MS Defender has been my mainstay since it came out and I can’t remember the last time it failed to stop a virus. I’ve had a couple of malware issues, but they were my fault..!
Just do an internet search Timmahh I was using MSE but it ended up letting me down badly with a nasty infection that required a clean install to get rid of
It went through a bad phase for a short period but they fixed it. As I said no problems for me…. Plus MSE is free….! 🙂
Even if they’re your fault – a trusted a/v should pick them up straight away, like Avast!
#AvastForever!
No… we all make mistakes, and… it’s free… 🙂
MSE was great 2-3 years ago but it has been failing many official AV tests in the past 2 years and barely makes any of the top 20 anti-virus lists nowadays.
i was long time MSE too till i got done. ive been BitDefender since then and on original cleanup it found a lot of threats that MSE must overlook. its a good free option but at the end of the day the old saying,”you get what you pay for” must be true, my computers a lot snappier and no viruses or malware since the switch… so far.
Nothing’s as slow as Symantec.
That’s why it’s not there on the list, it would have scaled the graph so much you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between all the others.