On McAfee’s advice, we opted to test application installation times with the expanded .msi executable for LibreOffice 3.4.3 running under Windows PowerShell with Administrator rights. PowerShell’s UI looks much like a command prompt, and our command reports back with the exact time spent on file installation. Note that the /qn argument suppresses all of the usual installation pop-ups for which you inevitably click the Next button.

The standout surprise here is GFI Vipre Antivirus. We expected all application installs to be slower with AV running than on our clean configuration since AV products all run in the background, monitor file unpacking, and add resource overhead. Honestly, we’re stumped as to how GFI achieves this, but the company does stake much of its product marketing on speed. We suspect that subsequent image re-installations and test averaging might have yielded numbers closer to that of the clean image, and what we’re seeing might be a statistical outlier. Still, even at parity with our clean time, GFI blows away the rest of the field on app installation performance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, AVG and Microsoft deliver our next best times. Compared to Kaspersky, Microsoft, and Symantec, our two free AV products are considerably simpler and more pared down in their feature breadth. Perhaps an abundance of analysis is leading to installation paralysis? Certainly, installing an office suite to a 5400 RPM hard drive in under three minutes is nothing to sneeze at, but the other way to look at this is that Symantec added 60% to our application time. If you tend to do a lot of program loading, this could be a concern.
- 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.