Its been a long time since I took a look at how antivirus products were performing. Recently both Av-Comparatives.org and Virus.gr released the results of their latest shootouts. You can view Virus.gr’s results over here. According to them the top seven antivirus products are:
G DATA 2009 – 98,89%
F-Secure 2009 – 98,72%
Kaspersky 2010 – 98,67%
AntiVir Premium 9 – 98,64%
ZoneAlarm Antivirus 8 – 98,62%
AntiVir Personal 9 – 98,56%
Ashampoo 1 – 98,48%
The Av-comparatives report also paints a similar picture. According to Av-comparatives.org the top 7 antivirus products are:
G DATA – 99.8%
AntiVir Premium – 99.4%
McAfee VirusScan+ – 98.7
Norton Antivirus – 98.4%
avast! Professional – 98.0%
F-Secure Antivirus – 97.9%
BitDefender – 97.8%
As usual G-Data is the best antivirus product in terms of detection rate, while Avira AntiVir Premium has the best detection rate among the single engine antivirus programs. McAfee, Norton, Avast, BitDefender and F-Secure (multi-engine) have once again performed rather well. However, the big difference in Av-comparative’s report is the shabby performance by Kaspersky. Kaspersky (which is 3rd according to Virus.gr) finished at the 11th spot. It seems that Kaspersky’s detection rate has been slipping during the past year. Trustport’s (multi-engine) performance has also suffered. AVG once again returned disappointing results in both the tests. Exactly why so many people prefer AVG is beyond me.
In the end picking the best free as well as paid antivirus product isn’t very difficult. G-Data is still too bulky and sluggish, which makes it a poor choice compared to some of the alternatives. Avira may have some false positive problem, but it’s nothing major. AntiVir has the best detection rate (among single engine products), has a decent scanning speed and is fairly light on the system. While it lacks the sophisticated interface or features of Kaspersky, it more than makes up in terms of performance. And in case you find Avira too annoying, Norton should prove to be a worthy alternative.
Download Best Free Antivirus Software: Avira AntiVir Personal
Download Best Antivirus Software: Avira AntiVir Premium
Been using Microsoft Security Essential, Beta and have been pretty happy with it. Isn’t a resource hog and detection rate has been really good. Yes doesn’t have any advance features, but good for a tension free AV.
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BitDefender 2010 did very good in my opinion, you didn’t say much about it. I’m using it on W7 and I am pretty satisfied with how it works. Kaspersky is going down, I switched to BitDefender due to an undetected virus with Kaspersky installed. No wonder it scored behind everybody.
I didn’t say a lot about BitDefender as there isn’t a lot to say about it. It has been consistently doing well (without being in the top 3) in terms of detection rate. I had tried the Bitdefender demo. Although it worked fine for me, I have seen a lot of people complaining about BitDefender 09. Its interface is known to be buggy and intrusion detection can cause unexpected problems. In fact it is notorious for causing BSODs.
All in all, Bitdefender isn’t a bad choice but try the demo and make sure it works fine on your system before purchasing it.
On my XP install I use Avast on my system in combination with WinDefender, CFP and Spybot. I feel quite safe with it.
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Spybot is pretty much trash. You can easily do without it. Thee antispyware software I use is Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.
I would Vouch for Microsoft Security Essential if u want a hassle free AV product. It won’t bug you with too many notifications and alerts, Gives a good detection rate and above all its free. Among the free available options, if not the best then it surely will be second next to Avira. Though it caught a Trojan which was right under my nose when running Avira.
Security Essential is hassle free all right. In fact its ideal for basic PC users. Doesn’t confuse them with too many options.
As far as detection rate is concerned I wont be convinced till it aces a shootout by av-test.org or av-comparatives.org
I more like to use kaspersky anti virus and the family of kaspersky
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Why were some of the most popular anti-virus companies left out of the article? Companies like Panda offer solutions for everything from home use to corporate level managed solutions. Computer Associates, Panda, AVG,,, a lot of the big players were not listed?
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I did mention AVG briefly. The ones you mentioned were tested by the av-shootouts I referenced. However,all of the performed pretty miserably.
Good, i like Avira very much.
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I’ve been using the free version of Avira for 2 years now ad it’s been amzing. AVG consumes way too much memory more than Kaspersky. If I ever come around to paying for an antivirus, Kaspersky would be my only choice.