Performance impact vs effectiveness

I've been using Norton AV 2011 for the past couple of years and my license is about to expire. Every so often, I try to re-evaluate the state of the anti-virus/anti-malware market and figure out which software best suits my needs. This is probably the same thing that everyone wants but I'm trying to determine which product represents the best balance between system performance impact and effectiveness at catching viruses/malware, etc. Based solely on effectiveness, I'm probably leaning a product from Norton, Kaspersky or possibly Bit Defender. Is there a benchmark of any kind that gauges how much of an impact the various av/am solutions place on a system? Thanks very much for any help you can provide!

 

You could try http://www.av-comparatives.org/ There is plenty of information to go on, performance, detection tests etc. If you hover your cursor over the comparatives box, you can see the different types of tests.
Obviously if you are paying for an AV, use their trial version first. Also i would use the removal tool to remove Norton.https://www-secure.symantec.com/norton-support/jsp/help-solutions.jsp?docid=kb20080710133834EN_EndUserProfile_en_us&product=home&pvid=f-home&version=1&lg=en&ct=us

 

Check out this thread in this same section: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=333556&page=3.

As far as performance goes, Norton blows away the competition when it comes to performance.

As far as protection goes, recent reviews on PC Magazine web site along with a few other non-AV lab sources, show Norton's malware protection could be a bit better but it is still in the top tier on that regard. Whereas Sonar protection is tops when it comes to exploits, it doesn't have an active proxy such as Avast web shield in place to monitor all web activity. This is a good example of performance versus effectiveness. Avast and Kaspersky will noticably slow your web browsing since they are monitoring all activity. Norton's Sonar primarily uses signatures and its hueristics are probably best described as average. So the possibilty of a 0-day threat from the web sneaking through is higher with Norton. However, Norton uses other mechanisms to catch the 0-day when it tries to install it's garbarge. Finally just because an active proxy is in place monitoring web activity does not guarranty that the 0-day threat will be caught.

 

My thanks to both of you for the information. It's much appreciated.

 

Do a trial ,i had Norton and Bitdefender suites my system better,Choose whats best for you

 

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