Free AV with lightest resources

Out of all the free AV out there which one will offer the lightest footprint or lightest on resources. Unless there are anyt good paid ones that can be trialed for say 6 months or more.

 

It would be a toss up between antivir pe and avg free, both are very light and only use around 10mb of ram.

 

Ok, I would of thought Avast would of been lighter than AntiVir.

 

Depends upon your Operating System. Antivir Premium on one of my computers takes a lot more memory than this, even without the MailGuard installed. But I agree that AVG and AntiVir are both very "light" in feel.

May also be worthwhile trying the free AOL KAV scanner which again has a lightweight RTM.

 

I think avast Home edition will be the best bet here..ease of use,low memory usage,good detection rate,cleans most of them...

 

The last time I tried AntiVir (with real-time scanner only) it always takes 40+ MB on my machine but no noticeable slowdown. avast! (with standard shield, web shield, network shield) takes maximum memory about 30+ MB when simultaneously scans several web sites at the same time (and will go down if no simultaneous scanning), but again no noticeable slow down with avast!.

 

When i used it, its memory use was just over 10mb, the same for avg free. Avast however was using well over 20mb. The new avg 7.5 is the lightest i have seen, its total ram use is only around 2mb.

 

Give it another try, since teh recent update (don't know when it was but sometime late August/Sep AntiVir free only uses between 4-6MB on my system. Before the update it was a constant 25MB. It really does have low impact on the system now.

 

Same here: AntiVir now uses ~5MB on both of my systems.

 

Current RAM usage for antivir free:

avgnt.exe 426 K
avguard.exe 2,396 K
sched.exe 5,008 K

Total: 7830 K

Not bad if you ask me. Also, barely any if no CPU usage

Alphalutra1

 

The last time I tried AntiVir is the last week.

There're actually no points or reasons for me to care much about the amount of memory an antivirus use as long as that antivirus don't noticeably slow down my machine or cause other problems. I have 768 MB of RAM, not so much but also not too low for normal operations.

Some antivirus probably are low memory consumption (e.g. AVG, Dr.Web, F-Prot, eTrust, Protector Plus), but for me, does it mean these antivirus always do a better than Symantec, avast!, McAfee, Kaspersky, F-Secure, AntiVir? I don't think so.

I think RAM or other resources are there for balanced using for optimal operations, not for reserving as much as possible for nothing.

 

Actually new AntiVir engine are very smart, the RAM usage rate will float up & down depend on how much scan task it need to perform. on my test on AVG 7.5 beta, if it seat quitely at background it take only 1-2MB. when i start work on alot of thing, like surf net, downlaod, word,... then it RAM up to 10MB+. AVGuard quite stable at around 9500K+.

 

AVG is light, Antivir is light & Avast is fairly light. AOL AVS is probably the heaviest IMO. I guess Avast is the heaviest after that. AVG and Antivir are equal in lightness as far as my experience goes.

 

IMO, resource is 1 thing, but scanning rate are much important issue. Antivir always rank top among these freebie, but no mail/http web guard. Avast got all-in-one, but will miss some thread. AVG is in the middle, scan rate & resource ok, but its GUI is everyone favour.

 

You could always go with the free one year offer for ETrust Antivirus version 8.1. It now has advanced heuristics and comes with $1500 protection against damage done by computer viruses. Not to mention a new interface. Heres a link :http://home3.ca.com/Microsoft/

 

AOL AVS ran around 7MB on my PC, and Antivir PE a little less, but I never noticed too much difference between them when it came to the speed of my programs opening up, or logging on and off. Start up seemed to take around the same length of time with either one installed as well. If I had to pick which one actually made the PC feel like it was running lighter however, I would have to go with Antivir. AVG Free for some reason felt even lighter still, but it may have been the differences in the way all three scanned files in RealTime.