Antivirus Performance or Accuracy? You Can Have Both! - PC Magazine
PC Magazine, by Neil Rubenking
A recent survey suggested that consumers value low performance impact higher than effective malware removal when it comes to choosing an antivirus utility. But when it comes to reporting on what antivirus is best, we really must give users what they actually need, not merely what they want. To that end, AV-Test Institute rates antivirus products on several different criteria. In the latest round of testing, performed under Windows 8.1, three products earned perfect scores in all areas.
Don't Let Them Hurt Me!
Let's face it, you really don't want to find that a ransomware attack has locked up all your data, or that a data-stealing Trojan has compromised your bank account. Protection against malware is important! AV-Test researchers challenged each antivirus with two different sets of malware, one set containing widely prevalent threats and another containing the very newest threats. They ran each test twice, once in January and once in February, using the newest edition of each antivirus, for a total of four tests.
About a third of the products did well enough to earn 6.0 of 6.0 possible points in this test, but three stood out by blocking 100% of the malware in all four tests. Those hot-shot malware maulers were: F-Secure, Norton, and Trend Micro.
At the other end of the scale, Microsoft's Windows Defender averaged less than 75 percent across the four tests. AV-Test keeps Microsoft in the mix as a baseline; an antivirus that can't do better than what's built in is doing a pretty poor job. Had Microsoft been included as part of the main sequence, it would have earned zero points for protection.
Don't Slow Me Down!
To check a security product's impact on system performance, AV-Test's researchers use a real-world approach. They measure the time required to perform activities like "visiting websites, downloading software, installing and running programs and copying data," comparing the times before and after installing each product.
Bitdefender, Kaspersky , and Qihoo earned a perfect 6.0 in this test. Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft slowed things enough that it only scored 3.5 points, and ThreatTrack's Vipre barely eked out 2.5 points. Read more.
