Lightest Antivirus

That's what I don't know and that's why I asked you to clarify it in my previous post.

 

For me Eset is lightest No noticeable impact on system boot, faster downloading of updates and no drag while opening and using programs and browsing. Very apt security software for laptop

 

i define 'light' as this- an antivirus program is 'light' if it does not slowdown the day to day activities of using a computer. the faster you can open programs, transfer files, watch videos, browse the web, the better.

i dont care what hardware resources it uses if it can do the above things (many programs sacrifice ram usage for a higher cpu usage anyway)

that is how i define light!

 

I set avast's sandbox to auto-mode, so today I haven't received anymore of those annoying 'open this or that program in a sandbox' alerts that I described a few posts earlier. however, avast's resource use has gone up.

For some times now (many hours), AvastSvc.exe has taken up ~20% CPU and exerted ~8775-17550 K/s of disk load according to AnVir Task Manager. For comparison, firefox.exe is using ~20% CPU and ~118 K/s disk load while I'm typing this post. Earlier I also had vlc player on, which needed ~3% CPU and 28 K/s disk load to play some flv-video in one corner of my screen.

fwiw, those resources are free in the sense that CPU and memory are not maxing out, and the extra activity is not causing a major slowdown in the responsiveness of other programs, but it is causing my laptop's hard disk and fan to spin faster ( = more noise). Is there anyway in avast to see what's causing all this activity (so I could decide which avast shield to disable, or which processes to potentially exclude from monitoring, or maybe something got stuck in avast's auto-sandbox?

 

I hope you can share you issue at here:http://forum.avast.com/
They will assist you once you started a new thread.

 

I'll get to it later - I need to register for that forum and don't want to get into that now.

I took a bunch of pics of AnVir Task Manager's tray info balloon as it displays the processes using most resources, and the second pic is from Task Manager.

Despite the high resource use, avast is still running smoothly, and I'm not experiencing a slowdown of other tasks or in general use of my laptop, so if this is just avast making use of spare resources, then I'm cool with it, but it is alarming.

 

the AV that has the least impact on your system. I think you shouldn't care about ram MB that much. Even with 1 GB of ram, to try and save some MBs with your AV is useless, its like you keep it in your desk's draw

 

Well I have used both Avast ,Symantec Norton AntiVirus/Norton 360 which I found these lightest Anti virus Software . Currently I am using Avast which is lightest one for me .

 

Thank you.

 

I have 4GB of RAM and MSE only ever takes up (at most) 70MB and usually sites at 60.

 

Since you have so much RAM, how important do you think it is to measure performance by its amount? People should seriously use CPU and Disk I/O as benchmarks instead.

 

I have nothing to compare it's at 0.... I saw it go to 3 once but it's been over a minute and 0 change.

If you'd like me to benchmark differently tell me how.

RAM is important to me since I have my pagefile disabled. So even if AV's have a minor difference of only 40MB or so it matters to me.

 

Look at idle CPU usage and average CPU usage in Resource Monitor. Also observe total I/O under Disk.

 

Read ~10,000 B/sec for I/O and it disappeared soon after.

And under CPU it's 0.00 average. 0 CPU. 33 threads.

 

fwiw, the high resource use by AvastSvc.exe has subsided for now. It stopped around the time of the last update earlier this week, although it may have been unrelated. The culprit behind the resource use was the File Shield component (maybe it was doing an initial scan of all my files in the background?) I still see high resource usage by Avast (similar to the stats above) during start-up when Avast checks for updates.

 

i wait for the day when antivirus programs have a setting where you can let it have how ever much ram you desire

 

I tested Avast out... put my computer to a crawl. I didn't understand why it should since I didn't max it out or anything. I have a pretty powerful computer too.

I currently have Comodo + MSE and together they use very little.

 

Lightest antivirus is avast. I'm using it in my netbook of ram 1 GB. And my pc is running more smoothly than ever.

 

Same issue for me. I find Norton AV to be light on every set up I've installed it on and it has great detection. I currently use Nod32 and have for years now but when my subscription runs out I think that I'll have a tough choice to make between the two.