I've only used Norton, Avira, Avast and NOD32. Years ago Norton wasn't a very good AV.. it was slow and it gave me the dreaded BSOD many times but now I think it has matured into an excellent AV with fast scan times and good detection rates. I've tried Avast on a couple of systems and I find it to be painfully slow..my system would almost come to an halt. I'm not sure why as many others find it ok. Maybe it didn't like some other software I had installed. NOD32 has always kept my system lightning fast and is probably my preferred AV over Norton. Avira I found to be a decent AV with no slowness. I have used Dr Web Cure It and Emsisoft Emergency Kit running in the background.. they didn't cause much slowness but there was some lag there and the scan times took forever. So for me the heaviest was Avast.
List of AVs I recently tried includes Avast AVG BitDefender F-Secure Avira Emsisoft F-Prot Dr.Web Vipre Immunet Plus Ad-Aware Pro For me, Emsisoft made a program execution slowest. Probably it's the heaviest ever AV tested on this PC. Eating up CPU power the most were Dr.Web. The lightest/fastest were AVG and Avira. I didn't remember about memory usage of them all as I didn't care about it. Now I just remembered when I used TrendMicro in early 2000s. My mom installed it on the only PC in the home. It was horribly heavy. Before 1year subscription ends, I replaced it with Avast, and the move proved to be a nice one.
Agree 100%. When we ran windows 98 on olde PC's but the OP says for fun and knowledge so I'll let the past go by!
Microsoft Security Essentials. However the others AV i recently used were Avast, Avira and Panda Cloud, so maybe its natural that MSE feels heavy in comparison...
Kaspersky has improved a lot after the latest release of their 2012 versions. I am using Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 and it's awesome! This being said from a user who used to use NOD32 then Eset Smart Security since 7 years
Wow, so many choices and yet many of us over the span with these Ms PCs likely only experimented with a smaller group of them over time. Notwithstanding past experiences with AV's whereby most all of them were considered "Heavy" per say as well as unstable, choosing today's current brands i also would lean toward Emsisoft as the fat daddy right now, but given the improvements over time with our devices/memory & such, IMHO that alone wouldn't be such a fair assessment as a disqualifying factor overall. By contrast, i also found Avira an abundantly light AV.
Kaspersky and Emsisoft when I trialed them (not for long) although it was a long time back and I can't remember which versions they were at the time. On the other hand, the lightest I've ever used were Avira free and Avast Home (esp. with custom shields). Panda Cloud was "reasonably light" for me although some said it was heavy on RAM. Eset Nod32 also ran reasonably fine for me. It's been some time since I last used a real-time AV so I can't say as to how things are currently. Other would know better.
I've used every major vendor at least once, and I have to say Norton and BitDefender were the worst on my systems at least. I love Eset (although it is a tad resource heavy) for paid and Avast is my fav. Free product. Avast is getting bloated though sadly
You speak about ESET CyberSecurity, yes? I think you said that it was a little too heavy when you tried it
Yupp. CyberSecurity was worth it but it did lag boot time like crazy. Took 90 secs to boot my macbook air. Apparently they fixed it now. I only use linux now though so have no idea how true that is. Great detection rate though.
Yea that's what I thought. Huh? Have you sold the MacBook Air, or are you saying that you run Linux on it?
Ah I understand. The Macs are built for OS X so that's probably why it didn't work as smooth. Even if it indeed is possible to use Win, or Linux on them.
For me Kaspersky seems heavy but that is probably my fault as I never give it a chance to learn me and begin to quiet period. My System is pretty fast. I have tons of ram and a very nice processor. Bit defender also annoys me as does ZoneAlarm. Zonealarm would probably be my choice of AV if it would install without issues every now and then. Sometimes it does sometimes it can be the worst headache for me. I have used Norton since 2009. I have never had an issue! I do like to install new programs as they release because I have a little obsession with security programs. Never install them with others of course and I do complete clean ups in between installs.
Pretty. Much. Apple uses nearly 100% proprietary drivers. Makes it pretty hard for linux to run. I installed Windows 7 just fine. No need for special boot loader or anything. Linux was a PITA to get working with a special bootloader and all.
I was like you, until I did this... Tip to increase performance while using Kaspersky Internet Security It changed the heavy Kaspersky into a Lightweight top notch security solution
Thanks. I am going to give that a whirl now on Windows 8 since it seems Kaspersky 2013 is one of the only compatible ones that will work. Norton and Mcafee say they are compatible but Mcafee is not in my vocabulary and Norton kicks my internet for some reason.
