Poll: Best Antivirus

[snave]

Worth noting that there are 3rd party analyses of the various items on the market out there. This one here seems pretty thorough, and includes the most important thing of all: the false positive test. Note that only MSE/Defender scores a perfect zero here. It's rather poor with zero day attacks, but when it shoots, it never misses. The assessments given all use it as a "default" state. Bearing this in mind, its worth noting that all the products listed hold some potential advantages over MSE in the protection stakes bar two: Ahnlab appears to provide no significant improvement upon MSE/Defender as a "default" state, whilst introucing a horrendous amount of false positives, and Symantec is outright objectively inferior in the March 2013 rankings.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/detection-test/

Note that rankings seem to fluctuate quite seriously between mere months, and between assessors and their respective methodologies, so if you really want a good overview, its best you have a peek through the archives of a few different studies and try to deduce a trend for a) the program you use and b) any product you're considering jumping ship for. Arguably the worst thing you can do though is to install multiple, as they can interefere with each other to the point that neither offers real-time protection (or can even simply crash Windows on startup).

 

[T3hSource]

I'm using the free Avira Personal.
It does it's job, but I now know from where I can get whatever I want and need without the danger of running into malware. That's the best anti-virus anyone could and should have.

 

[Xarathox]

Avast. It's free, unobtrusive and it works.

 

[Zipa]

Kaspersky, it has never let me down. It may be a hog when a scan is running but thats to be expected if its trying to scan a drive that someone is using.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Nod 32 is the best one I've used so far and I've used around 6 different ones over the years.

 

[Snowalker]

I use Vipre, pretty lightweight, non-intrusive. I like it.

 

[frizzlebyte]

Norton/Symantec stuff is ridiculously resource heavy, and I don't see the point of anything else you have to pay for.

My Norton is using 5 MB of memory right now, which is barely on the radar, as far as I'm concerned. Not really resource heavy since the 2009 version revamp, and Norton has saved my hide on more than one occasion.

And this is a recommendation from someone who used to swear Norton was in league with the devil, due to aforementioned resource-use issues.

How many MB of RAM a program takes is a terrible way of measuring how much resources it takes. In fact, it isn't a method of measuring performance at all. It's easy to force purge shit into the swap file, reducing the RAM footprint. But that is anything but a performance boost. RAM is fucking fast. HDDs aren't. Even SSDs doesn't hold a candle to it. You get the best possible performance when programs run entirely in RAM. Empty RAM is useless RAM. As long as there's a buffer zone for new programs, it's generally best to use up as much RAM as possible instead of using the swap, which laypersons tend to perceive as bad. "This program takes up 300MB of RAM! Such bloatware!" etc.
Anyway, point is, never use RAM usage for measuring performance. For anything.

For measuring AV software, it would be the added memory bandwidth usage and CPU load during certain operations. An internet traffic monitoring tool may not be noticeable at low speeds, but easily could choke up your computer when you're transferring at some 10MB/s, despite being under at under 10MB RAM usage. That's not good if you've got a 100Mbit connection, or are transferring things through a LAN connection.

Is there a way to monitor/log that kind of info? I'm curious about this now.

Also, I've never really noticed it bogging down my net connection, or my computer during file transfers of any kind. It usually scans files after I've downloaded them (which is a security risk in itself, but I don't know of any AV that actively scans incoming file downloads), and browsing doesn't *seem* affected.

The reason I like Norton is that I can just set it and forget it, and it does an adequate job of getting out of my way when I'm using the computer, and handles security issues on its own. A lot of the free ones (which I used to religiously use before rediscovering Norton in '09) don't, and require you to manually set permissions and firewall rules, which when I'm trying to work (or play) is a distraction rather than a power-user perk.

 

[Laughing Man]

You sneaky ninja you. Diving out of the trees and swiping the wind from my sails.

Sorry third person to say Linux so I am gonna totally steal that wind and leave this here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware

Best anti-virus

Along with whatever AV you decide you want to use.

 

[Serinanth]

http://www.av-comparatives.org/detection-test/

Sweet, it looks like F-secure is pretty good according to the 2012 data, as much as I hate charter, props for this.

 

[AlbertoDeSanta]

I find Vipre to be good. Costs a bit, but you get what you pay for and it definitely gets rid of the viruses you may encounter.

 

[likalaruku]

I used to use Avast with Threat Fire, but when Threat Fire suddenly stopped being freeware, I switched to Comodo for my firewall.

My choices were based off Maximum PC comparison tests & CNET user ratings.

I like Avast because it runs at all times instead of me having to do a scan once a week. The free version, however, does not come with a firewall.

Of course Maximum PC is now saying that the current version of Malwarebytes catches a lot of things Avast misses.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I like Avast. It's free and it works well.

I used to have Norton but it was a pain in the ass and was slowing down my computer somehow.

 

[Denamic]

Is there a way to monitor/log that kind of info? I'm curious about this now.

Also, I've never really noticed it bogging down my net connection, or my computer during file transfers of any kind. It usually scans files after I've downloaded them (which is a security risk in itself, but I don't know of any AV that actively scans incoming file downloads), and browsing doesn't *seem* affected.

The reason I like Norton is that I can just set it and forget it, and it does an adequate job of getting out of my way when I'm using the computer, and handles security issues on its own. A lot of the free ones (which I used to religiously use before rediscovering Norton in '09) don't, and require you to manually set permissions and firewall rules, which when I'm trying to work (or play) is a distraction rather than a power-user perk.

The task manager has a resource monitor that lets you see basic memory bandwidth usage and HDD/SSD read/write speeds. I prefer Process Explorer for more detailed information. It's also useful for a variety of things, as you can see the resources taken up by specific threads in an .exe file. You can even pause and kill them without shutting down the process itself. Fantastic for manually removing annoying adware and malware .dlls in explorer.exe

 

[Callate]

I'm going to have to sheepishly admit that while I was pretty happy with Avast, I just took my computer in to a shop in the hope of dealing with a recurring video card crash and they ran a Norton utility that apparently found some rootkit crap that Avast couldn't catch.

Beyond that, I don't know. I remember that I quit AVG a while back for reasons I don't fully remember, and Norton and McAfee have always seemed to want my attention and/or system resources when I least wanted to lend them. It's sounding like I should give Nod32 a look when I get my computer back.

 

[Zakarath]

Best antivirus is simply being intelligent and careful.

 

[Souplex]

What's this "Avast" thing?
It's leading the polls but I have never heard of it.
I also haven't heard of Windows Defender or Avira either.
Especially surprising since one of them has Windows in the name.
I use Norton, and have no real complaints.

 

[frizzlebyte]

Is there a way to monitor/log that kind of info? I'm curious about this now.

Also, I've never really noticed it bogging down my net connection, or my computer during file transfers of any kind. It usually scans files after I've downloaded them (which is a security risk in itself, but I don't know of any AV that actively scans incoming file downloads), and browsing doesn't *seem* affected.

The reason I like Norton is that I can just set it and forget it, and it does an adequate job of getting out of my way when I'm using the computer, and handles security issues on its own. A lot of the free ones (which I used to religiously use before rediscovering Norton in '09) don't, and require you to manually set permissions and firewall rules, which when I'm trying to work (or play) is a distraction rather than a power-user perk.

The task manager has a resource monitor that lets you see basic memory bandwidth usage and HDD/SSD read/write speeds. I prefer Process Explorer for more detailed information. It's also useful for a variety of things, as you can see the resources taken up by specific threads in an .exe file. You can even pause and kill them without shutting down the process itself. Fantastic for manually removing annoying adware and malware .dlls in explorer.exe

Just downloaded Process Explorer. Looks like (if I'm reading correctly) the process that I can ID as Norton's is actually taking up more like 20 MB of RAM, and maybe doing lots of HD I/Os, as well.

Thanks for steering me toward this, man. This is a really awesome tool.

What's this "Avast" thing?
It's leading the polls but I have never heard of it.
I also haven't heard of Windows Defender or Avira either.
Especially surprising since one of them has Windows in the name.
I use Norton, and have no real complaints.

I used to use it all the time, and it worked okay. Like you, though, Norton works good enough for me. I like Webroot too, if you'd ever be interested. It's pretty light on resources from what I can see.

 

[Get_A_Grip_]

If you're going to be paying for one I'd go with NOD32, barely affects performance and catches almost everything.

As far as free goes it's really a toss up between AVG and AVAST.

Malwarebytes and Spybot are a must to have aswell.