This was our first experience testing with Windows Performance Analysis tools. No doubt, this is old news to software developers, but for us, it was a great opportunity to dig into the individual software traces that happen during regular operations. For those who think that Microsoft gives short shrift to things like boot-up time, know that the company has devoted ample effort to making sure that OEMs have such tools and know-how to use them. A system builder has the power to see exactly how this or that bit of pre-installed code impacts other traces and where stalls are happening at the millisecond scale. Whether builders make effective use of these tools is a different story.

We ran this test three times, but there was no getting around the data before us: our clean config was the slowest for boot-up. Every AV product seemed to somehow accelerate the booting process. Perhaps this is somehow done with caching? We don’t know, but the average improvement over clean running was about 15 seconds.
GFI alone pulls ahead of the pack, shaving nearly 30 seconds off of our AV-free boot times. The other five contenders are statistically in a dead heat.
Note that we discovered an “aggressive boot time” setting in Symantec’s options, which is disabled by default. This default setting is what we reported above, but then we ran a second set of data with the option changed from “off” to “aggressive.” The resulting average time was 165.131 seconds—virtually no difference from the disabled score. If that’s the case, what is this feature doing, why is it disabled, and what does “aggressive” mean here?
- 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.