PCMag.com Best Free Antivirus Software

The latest from PCMag.com:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388652,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05079TX1K0000992

 

Still testing 'Antivirus' MBAM 1.46 against current AV's in removal tests?
On removal scores, mr. Rubenking notes; 'In my tests it tied with Ad-Aware FREE for top overall score, though it wasn't as effective against rootkits.'

Tested is the removal of scareware and rootkits (c/p'ed scores from link posted above).
MBAM: scareware 89%->8.1 ; rootkits 56%->4.0 ; overall score 80%-> 7.3
Ad-Aware: scareware 88%->8.0 ; rootkits 100%->6.4 ; overall score 91%-> 7.3

Granted, I pretty much suck in most parts of math but Rubenking seems lenient with numbers in this test.

 

So AdAware is listed near the top so is Comodo & Panda Cloud is really praised No Problems with Panda but really is AdAware & Comodo that superior. Where is Avira?

 

Not a serious proposition.

 

That's the point Panda Cloud and Comodo No Problems for me. But is AdAware reliable ??

 

Adaware has no sandboxing/cloud etc, how did that beat out Comodo

 

I am going to see why exactly this is.

I am going to see if I can get my hands on these as well. I am wondering what exactly these are and if at all relevant.

 

Remember Ad-Aware uses the Sunbelt Vipre engine in the free version. So it has its tech ontop of Lavasoft's tech in it so it should have pretty good detection.

I do wonder why some of the AV products are tested with different sample sets then others if I was reading the article right. It just seems that results would be way different for each under each cycle.

 

If you manage to get somewhere getting those files please let me know. I haven't been able to. TIA! Pedro.

 

Thankz for clarification about Ad-Aware "Ibrad"

 

It's important to note that all of the reviews are re-releases and their age varies quite a bit. For instance Ad-aware Free was reviewed in Dec 2010. The MBAM review is from May 2010. Since the products were reviewed at different times and in some cases are no longer current it's not accurate to compare them.

 

A nice read again

 

PC-Mag serious as always...

 

If Comodo Defense+ is enabled, I'm surprised 6% of malware got through. If not, I'm even more surprised that the AV is so effective. The former seems to be the case, with the article noting numerous popups.

Then there are the version issues, with Malwarebytes behind, and Norton unknown.

Lastly, the percent and score aren't in sync for some reason.

 

I second that!
Not serious at all!

 

From what I've seen with Defense+ and Partially Limited it will let some malware through. Limited takes care of this (seemingly) and a lot of the stuff that gets through partially limited doesn't actually fully install, you just get fragments of the malware (like, it tried to go to 10 places but was blocked from 8 of them, so it's completely broken but you still see pieces of it.)

 

wow Ad aware Better than Avast


That's a

 

Why do you feel the reviews are not serious? Most of the reviews are old and if you read them now you have to take that into account. As I noted earlier you can't compare the results of one of these free AV reviews to another because they were reviewed at different times - sometimes months apart. It seems to me that Neil's reviews are always serious. I don't always completely agree with his methodology or conclusions, but his tests are thorough and he tries to create a logical testing environment.

I read the Ad-aware review when it was first released and was surprised that it scored so well. Normally I wouldn't bother with Ad-aware, but I tried running it in a VM for a while based on the strength of the review. I eventually decided I didn't like it because it was very slow. I think Neil should give more weight to how these products impact system performance, but that's a different issue - he focuses more on detection and cleanup.

 

i am just curious, If a file is not blocked by HIPS but it is blocked by the guard scanner, why should mean less protection?
Could you elaborate more on this?

 

I would chose ad aware rather than comodo. Its much better when it comes to protection.

 

I'm trying it here on Win 7 x64 and it seems pretty light. I haven't run a scan yet though, maybe that's slower, I don't know.. But to me, what's most important is it's impact on system performance, if any, assuming that detection is good, of course.

 

I'd be interested to know what you think after you've run it for a bit. What I noticed was it took forever for the trayicon to load and sig updates were also very slow. I didn't time the scans.

 

Yep, I'll let you know.. It seems to load quickly when the OS starts up. Don't know yet about updating or scanning, but I'll check that out too.

 

Mmm... sure

 

Never used adaware. What protection does it offer?