How We Tested: Configuration
We tested on an open bench system comprised of the following components:
- Intel DX50SO2 motherboard (BIOS version 0876)
- Intel Core i7-2600K processor (Hyper-Threading enabled, 3.4 GHz)
- 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) OCZ Gold Edition 1333 MT/s DDR3, 9-9-9-20
- Sparkle Calibre X560 DF
- Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750 GB (primary drive)
- Patriot Wildfire 240 GB (secondary drive for image cloning)
- PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 860
On this hardware platform, we installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and applied all critical update patches effective October 2, 2011. This also included:
- Nvidia GeForce driver version 280.26
- Intel / Realtek ALC audio driver 6449
- Intel / Renesas USB 3.0 driver 2.1.25.0
- Intel Pro Network Connections LAN driver 16.5
- Intel / Marvell eSATA driver 1.2.0.7700
- Intel RST driver 10.6.0.1002
- Intel chipset device software 9.2.0.1030
Rather than run a totally clean configuration, we additionally installed the following applications to better mimic a real-world system:
- Google Chrome 14.0.835.163
- Firefox 7.0.1
- OpenOffice 3.3.0
- Google Picasa 3.8
- Apple iTunes 10.4.1
- Apple QuickTime 7.7
- Adobe Flash Player
- Adobe Reader X 10.1.1
- 7-Zip 9.20 for 64-bit Windows x64
- CPU-Z 1.58
- Microsoft .NET 4
- Microsoft SDK 7.1
- PCMark 7
- HTTPWatch
With all of this software installed, we then disabled UAC, Windows Update service, the screen saver, Windows system restore, all task scheduler events, Action Center notifications, automatic Windows Error Reporting, taskbar notifications, all hibernate/standby power settings, and Windows Media Player services. Firefox, Chrome, and IE were all configured to disable the initial wizard and crash prompting while their home page was set to about:blank.
Finally, we copied 10.0 GB of photos, video, and document files into a sample data folder. This comprised our “clean” image. The image used only a single account with no password to ensure automatic login after rebooting, and no unknown devices were present in Device Manager. All automatic updating tools were disabled, and we rebooted Windows before using Symantec Ghost 15.0 to back up the image to a secondary drive. Only after this image was created and finalized did we run our first tests and subsequently install our AV contenders. After testing was completed on one AV product, we would reformat the Scorpio drive, then copy the clean image back to the newly formatted drive for loading of the next AV product.