As the closest thing to a free "de facto" AV product on the market, Microsoft’s Security Essentials is sort of a must-have in a round-up of this sort, if only to use as a possible baseline for judging against other products. As you can see in the earlier AV-C charts, Security Essentials isn’t known for being best-of-breed, but it also doesn’t have to be. As a fairly stripped down, antivirus-only tool, it just has to be good enough. Which it is. You don’t see forums filled with people lamenting how viruses killed their systems because Security Essentials is useless. You see lots of complaints from people who didn’t install any AV product.
Microsoft installs quickly and updates with no hassle. As usual, we accepted all of the program’s default settings, save for disabling the scanning schedule. Security Essentials also prompted us to enable Windows Firewall if we didn’t have any third-party apps serving in its place, so we did this, as well. You don’t get much ability to configure or customize here, but that shouldn’t bother most mainstream users.

Symantec’s Norton Internet Security ($70; http://us.norton.com/internet-security/) descends from what may be the oldest, most successful, and most criticized AV product in the market. Norton has always strived to be the most feature-rich AV title available, and there was a long stretch of time in which that also meant being the most demanding on system resources. In this sense, the cure was often worse than the disease, and a Norton AV scan could often bring a single-core system to its knees. Of course, this led the market to value features like off-hours scheduling, deferred scanning during non-idle times, and making low CPU impact a top priority. The company is so phobic about this now that the phrase “Stop online dangers without sacrificing performance” is its top marketing bullet.
As the next image shows, Symantec makes heavy use of reputation analysis (branded as Download Insight 2.0) in its AV. You also get identity protection, antispyware, antispam, firewall, and phishing protection, all wrapped up in a slick UI that puts a fairly simple front end on a ton of options settings. The $70 price is for up to three systems for one year. A two-year license runs $115, and three years notches to $165. If you don’t mind giving up parental controls, malicious Web site blocking, some identity protection features, and Symantec’s password wallet, you could slide back to Norton AntiVirus 2012 ($40 for one year/one PC, $70 for three years/three PCs).
- 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.