Standby Time
The funny thing about standby time as a performance metric is that it’s commonly cited, yet infrequently relevant. Think about it. How often do you actually command your system to enter standby mode and then sit around waiting for it to happen? You don’t. Much more often, your system will slip into standby or hibernation as a result of power saving during prolonged idle time—when no one is present and waiting for the process to complete.
Still, standby is generally held up as another indicator of system impact, so we ran the tests.
Here we see a bit more differentiation than in our boot time results. Again, GFI turns in the best score of the group, still somehow beating our clean configuration. Now, though, McAfee and Microsoft also slip in ahead of our AV-free system. Symantec barely registers a slight impact, and Kaspersky and AVG come in close together at the back of the pack.
Despite there being a 28% variance from first to last place in this group, we’re not sure how much emphasis to place on this as a statement about overall performance. A positive or negative range of only nine seconds on a relatively slow system disk is fairly minor no matter how you look at it.