We felt it was important to represent a couple of the leading free AV products in our selections, and by our totally informal reckoning, AVG Free and avast! are two of the most popular. We certainly had several people in our last AV roundup request avast!. However, since that company is based in the Czech Republic and didn’t answer our press query, while AVG (located only three time zones away) bent over backward to help and participate, it made our choice simpler.
AVG Free (free.avg.com), as with most no-charge AV products, provides you with a solid antivirus core and little else in the way of free amenities. Most notably, the product lacks a firewall, so there’s no guarding inbound or outbound packet sniffing. Does it matter whether you detect a malicious before or after it reaches your system? Probably about the same as it matters if you extinguish a burning torch in your driveway instead of your hallway. You just don’t want something dangerous coming inside.
AVG Free still monitors your browsing and social networking. You’ll find a nifty tool called AVG Advice that proactively monitors Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, alerting you in the event of any “overuse of memory” by a browser. You’ll also be warned if AVG’s LinkScanner determines that a site is untrustworthy before you visit it. For $36, you can step into AVG Anti-Virus 2012 and thereby grab a firewall and priority tech support. For $49.49, AVG’s Internet Security 2012 will safeguard your wireless connections and email, as well as allegedly accelerate system start-up and rich content downloading.
GFI Vipre Antivirus (www.vipreantivirus.com/) comes to this story as our dark horse, a new contestant in our testing. Previously sold by Sunbelt before being acquired by GFI, the standard edition of Vipre covers antivirus, antispyware, email protection, and rootkit detection/removal. Vipre Premium adds in a firewall, ad blocking, Web site blocking, malicious script blocking, and more.
We can debate whether Vipre brings much that’s new to the AV space, but we definitely like having readily available phone tech support here in the U.S. Equally inviting are the product's flexible billing options. There are no auto-billing subscriptions—nice. Instead, you can select whether you want a license for one, two, or three or more systems, as well as a license duration of one, two, or three years or the PC’s lifetime. The Premium product spans from $30 for one year on one PC to $150 for lifetime support on three or more systems.
- Antivirus Need...and Greed
- Contenders: AVG And GFI
- Contenders: Kaspersky And McAfee
- Contenders: Microsoft And Symantec
- How We Tested: Configuration
- How We Tested: Benchmarking
- Application Installation
- Boot Time
- Standby Time
- PCMark 7 Results
- PCMark 7 Results, Continued
- Web Page Load Time
- Scanning Time
- Do Antivirus Suites Have A Big Impact On Performance?



i think something is wrong with your numbers.
Also, the timing of this article was excellent. I had just been doing some research about what anti-virus software I should switch to, mainly based on performance, but I guess I just got all the information I needed.
I stopped using AV products on my personal systems back in 2003. Norton back then was god-awful on a Pentium 4 systems, seemingly crushing the life out of a system. Even with a first generation WD Raptor 36GB my P4 2.6 would choke not only with Norton, but also McAfee. I might not use AV software, but I do put it on my family members' systems when it doesn't kill performance. In that respect these modern solutions seem much better.
>>Apparently, this is somewhat like saying you can boil water at 230 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 260 degrees. As long as the water is at 212 degrees or higher, no one really cares.
i think something is wrong with your numbers.
I had kaspersky on my intel i7-920 system with a SSD app/boot drive, and kaspersky brought my system to it's knees compared to a clean system without any antivirus. It was like a computer from 7 years ago in it's response time. Try to install something? Took 10 seconds to start the pre-scan, then it would pre-scan and then install was slower. Run firefox from a fresh boot? Wait 3 seconds. 3 seconds? With a SSD?
I removed it and tried out norton internet security and everything is instant like my clean system. I don't even notice that I have it most of the time. I attribute that partially to my good system, but I attribute the other part to it not just adding arbitrary wait times onto everything I try to do. Use that processor! I have multiple more to spare!
I know people think dirty of Norton, but as long as it protects me while pretty much being invisible to my performance to the naked eye, I'll give the once slow kid in the class if he's a genius now. I don't know why, but it works.
Tom's something is wrong with your test bench.
If anyone is interested, I did ran my own tests for most of the latest security suites and have reached to the conclusion that Avast 6 is the fastest around. A scan on 10 GB of data on an SSD took ~2 minutes , compared to 8 minutes it that took Kaspersky to finish the same job.
I agree that Avira free should have also been included to balance the field a little bit.