Which anti-virus software do you use?

[davdee]

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Hi. I use the free Avast and it seems to run OK. Thinking of going to the paid version for my earning laptop.
One thing: all AV programs like to show they are doing something (maybe to justify what you paid

[pagogrp]

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AV is one of those things that everyone has their favorite product & everyone has a products that have caused them grief whilst others rave about how good the product is. many of the top AV products also seem to go through cycles of being really well respected then panned by the gossip sites. Symantec is a great example of this – 2-3 years ago it was considered a horror product whereas now it is generally regarded a good product.

Some of the main criteria involves time regularity of updates -some update hourly some update daily or whenever. Load on the system is now considered of major importance so that the impact on system performance is a low as possible & detection rates need to be as high as possible.

We use a mixture of G Data & Vipre. G Data is a dual engine product which uses the BitDefender & Avast scan engines & which regularly rates in excess of 99% detection rate in reviews. Vipre is a new age product that is low on system resource usage.

[tonyk]

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i use mcafee and find to be very effective.

[chook]

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Thanks everyone for your input. I have downloaded the AVG free trial so will try it out for a month. I was hoping that changing to a different product might speed up my loading times but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to my page loading times. I might just have to concede and try ADSL2 (currently on ADSL1).

[Stuart B]

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What does your choice of antivirus have to do with the speed that you can load a website?

[pagogrp]

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Lemonchip,

Where the AV is set to scan web traffic for malware, it will impact on the speed at which webpages load. A bad AV will significantly slow the load speed. A good AV will have negligible impact.

Cheers

[bridiej]

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Up until last year I had always used AVG’s free AV…. but then I found it made my PC (and laptop) incredibly slow. I switched to Avast for a while but had a similar problem. When my new PC arrived it was preloaded with Trend Micro’s AV and I find that works well.

[John C.]

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bridiej, post: 84949 wrote:

Up until last year I had always used AVG’s free AV…. but then I found it made my PC (and laptop) incredibly slow. I switched to Avast for a while but had a similar problem. When my new PC arrived it was preloaded with Trend Micro’s AV and I find that works well.

How old was your old PC Bridie? I’d guess that the difference in performance you’re experiencing has much more to do with the power and speed of your computer than it does the difference between AVG and Trend Micro. Both a good anti virus packages in my opinion.

[bridiej]

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Both the PC and laptop were quite old, but if I uninstalled the AV they were so much faster….! Probably the updated versions of AVG and Avast were too much for the poor old things…

[John C.]

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bridiej, post: 85003 wrote:

Both the PC and laptop were quite old, but if I uninstalled the AV they were so much faster….! Probably the updated versions of AVG and Avast were too much for the poor old things…

Yes AV software tends to make old computers really sluggish, but operating with no AV at all is inviting trouble.

I doubt that there would be much difference in performance on your old computer between AVG and Trend Micro – Trend seems faster to you, because your computer is probably 10 times more powerful than your old one

[Roberto Gerola]

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For MS Windows, Microsoft offers Security Essentials.
It is free for business use up to 10 PCs : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security_essentials/default.aspx

Roberto

—
http://speedtech.it

[Neill]

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Hi all,

I just stumbled across this thread and couldn’t help myself. Which AV security software do you go with?

The short answer is that the leading ones are all pretty good. Companies like AVG, Webroot, Kaspersky, Symantec, CA, Trend Micro have all been very good for a long time now. The truth is that there is usually not a lot separating the leading players these days. Some marketing people will tell you otherwise but more often than not, they don’t know what they are talking about.

I used to work (and part-own) a software security company for many years called PC Tools which we eventually sold to Symantec nearly two years ago. We used to do our own internal weekly tests between leading software products to see how we were going. Because we were always skeptical of internal results, we also contracted outsiders to do a variety of tests every two weeks as a sanity check and never shared the detailed results internally lest we taint the results in future. Finally, we watched very closely the external results that were awarded by many different reviewers out there.

Just about all the names mentioned in this post are very good. I can tell you as a former insider though that you will get your answer if you regularly follow Neil Rubenking’s reviews in PC Magazine who is probably the most thorough, objective and watched reviewer in the software security market for many years now. In a a posting earlier this year (see link below), he says “But in the end the Editors’ Choice has to go to Norton Internet Security 2011 for standard suite and Norton 360 Version 5.0 for mega-suite.” His review comments on the other products in detail but you can see that yourself if you follow the link below. I was surprised to see AVG way down on the list as they have been pretty solid operator for a long time now.

As I said before though, there is not a lot of difference between the leading players and the horses in this race do swap the lead from time to time.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369749,00.asp

[Anonymous]

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Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed post Neill. We really appreciate the inside goss, and I’m sure your comments will be very useful to many people in our community.

Love your work!
Jayne

[IgniteDM]

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With 2 computer repair stores as part of our company I can say that we only recommend Kaspersky. Its the only one we stock, its the only one we recommend.

We repair well over 100 computers a month and..time and time again we have customers come in with antivirus software such as AVG, Trend, Bullguard, Norton, MacAfee – with viruses (virii??). In many cases a scan with Kaspersky is the only software that picks up some of the nastier viruses.

When doing virus scans for customers, we scan with up to 5 different types of anti virus/malware etc software and Kaspersky continually comes up trumps.

I find it to be quite competitively priced as well. In our experience, you get what you pay for !!

As a mac user personally, I did run Kaspersky for Mac for a while… but it never picked anything up so I happily concluded I can continue in my blissful ignorance as a mac user that is not susceptible to viruses

[Author]

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