AVG vs. Avast vs. AntiVir

[Death Blade]

antivir would be great. avg... let's just say i had a bad experience with it. the whole damned program decided to deactivate itself for some reason and i could not start up the realtime protection. then i changed to avasta and yeah, worked, but has a damn big memory footprint and with 25 icons in the right side of the taskbar for my com(yes, 25) sorta lag. so now i use comodo, which was tested to be the best firewall this year on matousec to stop antivir's popups by making avnotify.exe an isolated app. and for antispyware i use superantispyware, scanning once a week.

essentially my com's security look like

firewall - comodo

antivirus - antivir

antispyware - superantispyware and threatfire

antirootkit - unhackme

and peerguardian 2.0

my friend got me the unhackme for free, so i didn't spend a single cent on anything.

to get the numbers for detection rate, click here

Edited June 16, 2008 by Death Blade

[cork1958]

Another vote for AntiVir here.

AVG and Avast are both total hogs!! Not even close to as good either.

[Plarkster]

I don't have any problems with Avasts memory usage, in fact Avast doesn't seem to affect my system at all.

AVG is ok, AntiVir is pretty good but I always go back to Avast. I also don't understand why so many people don't use Avast just because of the interface - either get a different skin or disable skins altogether so you get a clean and simple 'AntiVir style' interface. I personally don't have any problems with the default media player skin - it looks great and is simple to use once you get used to it like any program really.

With regard to memory usage, AVG seems to use the most and Avast and AntiVir seem to use about the same as I don't really notice them running. Would love to see some properly measured results, rather than having a look in task manager.

[Angel Blue01]

Antivir slowed my Windows startup on my laptop in Vista by quite a bit. The updator seems to try to run even if there isn't an Internet connection slowing everything down, when it exits its OK.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Just installed antivir on a VM just to test it. I new it displayed ads during updates, but....................... So i'm sitting here at my computer watching it update. The fact that you look at a big download box as it updates is obtrusive enough. But then the ad appeared. Not talking about a small ad. It was HUGE ad. What you would have heard if you were hear, was WHAT THE ****!!!!.

This will never be able to be installed on any of my customers machines. Way to obtrusive.

and yes I know you can block a certain exe to kill the ads. But its the principle of the thing.

On a second note, I have a very short funny "Free antivirus story".

So one of my customers called me telling me that her internet didn't work. She was already on the phone with the ISP for a while. She said as she was talking with him on the phone, avast came up and said in her try as alittle box, saying something like "avast Failed to update, because no internet connection was detected". The tech (rent a tech) on the other end of the phone said. "DON'T CLICK ON THAT it might be dangerous. I've never heard of avast before".

anyway, thats the end of the story, I got a kick out of that.

Edited June 17, 2008 by warwagon

[zerologic]

Another vote for AntiVir here.

AVG and Avast are both total hogs!! Not even close to as good either.

Actually AVG V8 Free is really good if you don't install it with that annoying link scanner:

c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch

:happy:

[ozulus]

Antivir is the best. Though I'm using Premium version now. I think they deserve the 20€, compared to the cost of the others (ESET and Kaspersky for example) it's quite cheap. So I don't see the update add, but I never had any trouble with it before, it was just once per day and you could always schedule it to a different time so you don't have to worry with it poping.

[zerologic]

Antivir is the best. Though I'm using Premium version now. I think they deserve the 20?, compared to the cost of the others (ESET and Kaspersky for example) it's quite cheap. So I don't see the update add, but I never had any trouble with it before, it was just once per day and you could always schedule it to a different time so you don't have to worry with it poping.

Sure Avira is a great product. I find it a bichattyi> when it finds malware, it also has more false positives:ermm:m:

[fix-this!]

Sure Avira is a great product. I find it a bit chatty when it finds malware, it also has more false positives. :ermm:

umm i find it the opposite of that. im very pleased with it, also reports im seeing online has it at a 99% detection rate.

[zerologic]

umm i find it the opposite of that. im very pleased with it, also reports im seeing online has it at a 99% detection rate.

Really? I found Avira generated 4 dialog boxes warning me that 1 download was malware (which it was). I would have thought I dialog would have been sufficient. The other issue I've seen, is a measurable decrease in performance in Windows; doing common tasks such as internet browsing and using explorer to copy files. :/

As far as detection goes. Totally agree, Avira is great there. Top product. Perhaps I might play with it again when Version 9 is released. :happy:

[Digitalx]

haven't had an issue with avast 4.8 home here

[ozulus]

Last test of AV Comparatives noted that Avira now has much less False Positives than before.

[spaceelf]

Actually AVG V8 Free is really good if you don't install it with that annoying link scanner:

c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch

:happy:

I believe his logic is that AVG8 has a lot of processes and uses up memory. The logic doesn't really follow though, since the apps likely share a memory pool and an inactive process doesn't really take any resources at all. It still has what I absolutely love about AVG, which is I don't even notice it's running.

I'll never use an AV that slows down my system. PCs are fast enough now there's absolutely no good reason for that.

[Mike Frett]

I'm quite pleased with Avira AntiVir. Liked AVG7 but a forced upgrade to version 8 killed that for me. Version 8 is an f'n bloated hog.

[Plarkster]

The fact that you look at a big download box as it updates is obtrusive enough.

Just go into the options and set the updates to invisible and you won't see the download box anymore.

[jgutierrez]

Update: AntiVir uses ~9k memory.

The only "bugging" thing about AntiVir is the ad supported updater. Overall, it's a good program.

If anyone can give me results that say that Avast! is lighter, then take a screenshot of its memory usage.

Thanks.

Here it is after 4 hours working. Only resident scanner enabled (no P2P, no mail, ...).

It is under Vista Home Premium x64, at iddle (no files being scaned right now).

With same setting Avira needs about 10 meg more.

Also, CPU usage for Avast, seems less intrusive to me, althought detection ratio could not be as hight.

Edited November 30, 2008 by jgutierrez