subjective test of some AV packages for resource consumption

[Stuart Krivis]

There has been continuing discussion of various AV packages being
resource hogs.

I had always thought that KAV (Kaspersky) was pretty
resource-intensive. AVG seemed light-weight, but I just don't trust
it (I've seen it just stop updating with no notice to the user).
Avast seemed in the middle-rank.

I recently tried: Kaspersky 5 Personal and Pro, Avast 4 Home,
F-Protect, F-Secure, NOD32, and Panda Platinum. This was with XP Pro
SP2.

Kaspersky did bring my system to its knees. However, I found some
info on an unoffical support board that indicated that turning off
System Restore makes a big difference, and also that it may take a
couple of weeks before KAV fingerprints most of your system and
stops being so resource intensive.

I switched off System Restore and the performance was much better.
One interesting thing is that I had tried Pro and then un-installed
it, then tried Personal. The script-checking in IE still appeared to
work. (You get a little K icon flashing at the bottom.)

Avast still strikes me as being in the middle ground.

F-Protect seemed to be very light on resources. You could hardly
tell it was running. However, I found that it was blocking access to
database files in Agent due to them being infected. Agent didn't
like that, and there's no way to exclude anything currently in
F-Prot. I rate F-Prot as good, but they're still working on the
interface according to the docs. I'd need a bit more control over
its behavior before I'd want to use it.

F-Secure wouldn't work for me. It kept crashing.

NOD32 seems to be light on resources.

Panda is also quite light on resources. It impacts my system less
than Avast, and Panda gave me a free 1-year license. Everything
seems to work, and I've generally heard good things about Panda
(although I've seen some reports of people having it crash on them).
It's been stable for me here for the last several days.

I'll stick with Panda for now, and move back to Avast if I see any
problems.

If I had a faster machine, I'd likely go with KAV Personal Pro.
(Although some of Panda's other products look interesting too.)

Note that these results say nothing about the effectiveness of the
products. It's also strictly my opinion, and YMMV.

One last thing, if you install KAV and then decide to unistall it,
you may want to grab KLStreamRemover and run it. (Only needed if
you're using NTFS.) KAV stores info in ADS, and doesn't appear to
remove it when you un-install.

 

[aD]

There has been continuing discussion of various AV packages being
resource hogs.

I had always thought that KAV (Kaspersky) was pretty
resource-intensive. AVG seemed light-weight, but I just don't trust
it (I've seen it just stop updating with no notice to the user).
Avast seemed in the middle-rank.

I recently tried: Kaspersky 5 Personal and Pro, Avast 4 Home,
F-Protect, F-Secure, NOD32, and Panda Platinum. This was with XP Pro
SP2.

I've been pondering what to use instead of Norton Antivirus for a few
weeks now.

NAV is as bloated as Office XP and I'm getting less and less happy with
it. I've also had two clients who's XP machines BSOD after shutting down
complaining of SYMEVENT.SYS once they had NAV 2003/4 installed on them,
and I've never been able to fix it.

One thing is that I do trust NAV as much as one can "trust" a program.
It has never let a virus past and I've had good experience of it auto
updating reliably.

Any replacement of NAV would have to be similarly trustworthy.


aD

 

[Stuart Krivis]

I've been pondering what to use instead of Norton Antivirus for a few
weeks now.

NAV is as bloated as Office XP and I'm getting less and less happy with
it. I've also had two clients who's XP machines BSOD after shutting down
complaining of SYMEVENT.SYS once they had NAV 2003/4 installed on them,
and I've never been able to fix it.

One thing is that I do trust NAV as much as one can "trust" a program.
It has never let a virus past and I've had good experience of it auto
updating reliably.

Any replacement of NAV would have to be similarly trustworthy.

Personally, I don't trust NAV. I've seen it let things past that
were then cleared up by other AV packages. But that's just my
opinion.

Kaspersky and F-Prot have been around for a long time and their
authors are very well-respected.

I've been hearing good things about Panda's detection and repair.
They seem very responsive to communication from customers too.

A lot of people like Avast, and it's free for home use.

F-Secure is a reputable company. I've used some of their products in
the past and found them to be very satisfactory.

A lot of people use AVG. I have my wife using it because it has a
plugin for Eudora, and she prefers to use that. I just have to keep
checking AVG to make sure it's updating. More work for me, but it
works out better for her than some others. (I also have her using a
proxy for Hotmail POP3, so it would be inconvenient to select an AV
product that also used a POP3 proxy for e-mail scanning.)

You could start with the products I "tested" and see if they perform
acceptably for you. I personally trust Sophos and Kaspersky the
most, with F-Prot right up there.

Avast also performed very acceptably for me, over a long period of
time.

Again, my "test" was simply my comments on which packages seemed to
be (subjectively) the most resource intensive on my system. The
comments I made just now on the efficacy of various packages are
just my opinion, and are anecdotal.

You really have to try some packages and see if you can live with
them. Not all software is good for all people. You might hate what I
love.

You can get some opinions in this newsgroup on what the reputable AV
packages are, and there are also various places that have done
tests. ICSA and Virus Bulletin might be places to start.



Another approach to AV is InVircible. It requires a bit more
knowledge out of the user, but you may also get more for that
investment. It's certainly worth looking at.