Microsoft Security Essentials long held the title as the most lightweight antivirus option, but with its plummeting ability to protect your system from threats, plenty of challengers have returned to the fore. So which one offers the best balance of safety and speed? The scores are in.
Image by elhombredenegro / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
This post was originally published on Gizmodo Australia.
Antivirus test site AV-Comparatives has released the results of its latest benchmarks, comparing the performance of 20 AV programs, including free favourites Avast, AVG and Avira, along with stalwarts F-Secure and Kaspersky.
Using a modestly-equipped PC (Intel i5-4210U, 4GB RAM and SATA II drives), the speed of file-copying, archiving, installing and launching apps and downloading were tested, as well as a run through PC Mark 8 Professional to gauge general system responsiveness.
Here are the ratings, in number and graph form:
Image by AV-Comparatives
So if you’re running Avast, good for you! ThreatTrack on the other hand… you might want to consider your options.
Performance Tests [AV-Comparatives, via Betanews]
Comments
7 responses to “Avast Tops List Of Antivirus Suites That Won’t Bog Down Your System”
Just something to think about here, but could it also be that some of the other options have more of an impact because they also have more features? Or can the thought chain go the other way and say that maybe it doesn’t provide the same level of protection other anti virus suites provide?
After looking into this more, I found that the same company that ran these tests also found that Avast and Avira had many more false positives than its rivals. As a matter of fact in March their test had 75 instances of false positives, making it only second highest FP rate to Baidu’s 94 (Never heard of them).
But never let a moment more study get in the way of a good advertisement.
Policy here is that advertisements are disclosed. This isn’t an advertisement, it’s just an article describing one particular metric of AV programs: performance overhead. And in that respect Avast comes out on top.
Personally, I’ll happily take false positives in exchange for thorough protection at low overhead.
yeah, im with you. im happy for it to slow down my system if it means it’s not flooding my home screen with advert pop’ups and giving me thorough protection
This is only measuring performance impacts. It’s not measuring anything else, and the article clearly states that.
And I think it’s an important statistic. I’d rather not have my AV application bog down my system. I currently use AVG and looks like it scores pretty highly here, so I’ll happily stick to it.
I use the paid version of avast on an old dell I5 laptop E6140 Latitude. Works well, no noticeable slowdowns.
BUT also use a paid command line (non TSR) scanner every now and then for that second- malware-scan-opinion.
Why is it that Microsoft Security Essentials is not listed.
If you are going to talk about it in the first sentence then measure it as well.
Trying to pull the wool over every ones eyes?
Its not measured because it is completely ineffective.