Testing AV Suites.

[Jarod]

Antivirus suites, either they don't detect anything or they're so bloated you can't use your computer with them installed.

We're going to be testing several for protection and performance soon.
I'm setting up a Virtual Machine to run windows XP in, We'll install an antivirus suite, measure the ram and boot speed effects, go to a ton of infected pages and see how well it fares, then shut it down, copy the fresh disc image in so we have a fresh install and then we'll do it all over again with a different av suite.

I'm thinking of testing these suites so far:

• Avast
• AVG
• Avira
• Bitdefender
• Clamwin
• MSE
• NOD32

Possibly more as we go, reply with the av program you'd like to see tested

[foxmiles]

I dropped AVG for it's bloat / slowdown years ago and was amazed with how much lighter avast was, now I've dropped avast for MSE and have the same feeling, I'd like to know if I'm trading security for performance (not that I necessarily object to that, but it needs to be considered), and of course, if there is a better alternative I haven't tried.

Clamwin doesn't do on-access scanning, so there's no real-time protection as far as I know. Therefor it should use no system resources and not detect anything unless manually run. (best performance & worst protection)

check out http://www.av-comparatives.org/en/comparativesreviews for some studies on av scanners.

[Jarod]

I just installed Bitdefender Free, so far it seems really good as far as performance, the only complaint so far is it does have a "nag screen" that has popped up every time I boot. that may get it uninstalled very quickly. However I'll give it a few days as it had some issues before my last reboot that could have caused that behavior.

Looks like it uses around 50M of ram while running and scanning at the same time, which is pretty nice for an antivirus noted as being 99.4% effective or something like that.