It would be nice if there was a group vote as allot of this is personal preference, there are many not just one. I'd vote for Panda Cloud,Prevx,Avast,ESET.
The purpose of the poll is not to vote for your favorite anti-virus, that could be many, is to vote for the anti-virus that has the less impact in your system.
Emsisoft Anti Malware, not super light, but very effective for fight agaist all kind of malware. As firewall Privatefirewall.
I think that many people are voting for their favourite AV. I honestly don't know what the lightest AV is, or the 'lightness' of any particular AV on any particular system. It kind of reminds me of the introduction to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (where he discusses the meaning of lightness) LOL! I use MSE myself (on desktop & laptop) but I have never known an AV to be as light as The Panda Cloud (freeware). I don't know any figures but I think it would take some beating in 'lightness'.
I have thought the same thing, Daveski17, that maybe this poll is a popularity poll instead of what the OP intended. But that might not be the case. And lightness, if you suddenly have it when you didn't previously have it, is easy to detect. Vipre Premium is serving me well in that department... start ups seem faster, browsing seems faster, general pc operations seem faster. But I'm comparing it to two programs (FW & AV) that were on my sytems before. Point being, maybe it is the removal of a FW/HIPS that has given me this boost, and not an AV. Vipre feels much faster than avast to me, which I ran for 3½ years. But I have no numbers to refer to... just overall feel, which is subjective. When you think about it, a poll about the lightest AV is destined to be a poll that is impacted by popularity. For example, the lightest might be an AV that very few people have tried, so it ends up with hardly any votes.
I'll say! I tried the Panda Cloud on my laptop after using McAfee for a few months. That was one BIG difference.
I agree, the only way to find out on a particular system would be to test all the single engine companies out there, something that I would never do as lightness of an AV is important but detection is more important. Considering that most single engine AVs with excellent detection are also quite light nowadays, the choice of a light AV keeping in mind the lightness/high detection combination becomes critical when considering multi-engine versus single- engine AVs.
In my opinion,Avast! and Panda cloud are the lightest AVs.I tried Vipre before,it is damn light on resources too but unfortunately your CPU usage will rise to 100% occasionally or unexpectedly when you have Vipre installed.
Same as me.I tried Bitdefender,Vipre,DefenseWall previously but I don't know why ESET(even it is only fairly light) and Avast!(even do not have superior detection) are still under my personal taste.No other Av can really replace both of them.
Lightest, as observed by me, in order - 1. NOD 32 2. avast 3. MSE - with scan incoming files only. 4. Norton Antivirus 2011
agreed. while i agree eset should def be in the lightest category i own both and eset is not as light as avast is. at least comparing the latest versions. also no matter how many times i have tested vipre i never found it as light as anyone says. i used it on a fairly new and pretty fast notebook with a 2.98 core 2 duo and 4gb ram and i saw it slow that down at times not all the time though like some. id say avast, norton 2011 and eset are the top three
