AV-Comparatives: Real-World Protection Test - February 2018

http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

 

Wow look at Microsoft ~ 100%.

 

Kaspersky "won" it again - 100% and 0 FPs.
A lot of vendors got stuck at 99,5%

 

Use Microsoft and save your money, well done Microsoft!

 

Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Microsoft and F-Secure all of them equally impressive!

 

I wouldn't say the are equally impressive. F-Secure had 14 false positives, which is a very bad result.

 

I also agree, F-Secure has systematically produced too many FPs for years, for the average user it would be disastrous. Amazing results from Microsoft, I guess most companies are freaking out at its stellar performance.

Companies like Bitdefender, Kaspersky have lately issued free versions of their programs probably in anticipation of the great performance of Microsoft. I just hope that by the time my current license expires, MS will have improved its system impact on some machines, my Samsung and Asus with i7 CPUs are definitely slower using it...

 

I hope they improve that too, but I have no idea if that is something Microsoft is going to work on. Aside from the performance issues, WD is proving to be a very good antivirus. If the performance issues were fixed, I would use it on all my computers.

 

Well, I personally never considered fp's as a real issue, at least not at the degree of importance other people put.

On the other hand, I really applaud the work Microsoft is doing on computer security, they are steadily and silently improving this field. I wonder what their bashers will say now.

 

I only notice any difference between Norton and Windows Defender on my slowest machine. I wouldn't say there is a huge difference there either, mainly waiting for installer icons to load in my Downloads folder.

Well done Microsoft!

 

I consider them to be a big issue, as the average user will assume everything detected by their antivirus is an actual threat and will not consider that safe files may be wrongly detected and quarantined. Of course, more experienced users are not going to blindly believe that everything detected is a threat. But, it's still an annoyance when something legitimate is detected. What makes it worse, is that just about all security software these days, will automatically quarantine everything detected, rather than asking them what they want to do when a threat is detected.

One more point is that, the more safe files an antivirus detects, the greater chance it could remove a needed system file and break Windows.

They will always find something to criticise. The lack of performance, is my only complaint.

 

+1

 

I'll say this is enough for me to never wanna touch Windows Defender, because I value my computer's performance (and this is not just from the graph below but from my and others' personal experience):

 

+1

 

+2

 

+3

 

I think they all did (and still do) a good job. They all blocked at least 95 percent of the malware thrown at them - good enough for me. With 14 FPs, however, F-Secure is the odd one out here. Today's AV are (almost) equally good as far as their detection rates are concerned (95+ per cent), but there are still striking differences as far as lightness and FPs are concerned. Just my two cents.

 

+1

THAT, right there is all is left what they need to remedy and I would go with WD throughout my own series of machines.

In local testing they snatch up really very well and log then add the behavior it seems to a list of sorts. Not too shabby.

Finally they put some magnetic force into WD against malwares. BUT, time for them to streamline it's performance code intelligently to bare minimum so it doesn't weigh so heavy on system performance energy.

 

You've been fortunate enough that you have never had to format and reinstall a PC that was destroyed by a false positive. I've had to do so 5 or 6 times over the last decade. It's not a daily problem, but one that should never happen. In almost every case the product deleted system files that had been signed by Microsoft. Various AV products have done this so it is an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed by any company that is detecting false positives. I prefer AV tests that subtract the false positives from the overall score.

 

in the last 10 yrs, i can think of a number of vendors whose av product trashed systems due to a bad sig update (panda, avg, avast, symantec, vipre, webroot, bitdefender) - how many of these products show low fps in regular testing? more important in this situation is release quality control and testing of new sigs.

i've personally encountered two total FPs with the f-secure products i use, one website and one behavioral detection (due to low reputation, new file). "high" incidence of fps in a testing environment doesn't mean a user is going to encounter a ton of fps during normal day-to-day use.

 

I feel pretty good now running WD and VoodooShield on this old desktop. Good job Microsoft. It doesn't feel sluggish, and it's no barn burner. This desktop an old AMD 965 BE with 4 gigs RAM. It doesn't appear noticeably slower to me that when I ran NOD 32 and Avast several years ago. Some people make it sound like WD will make your PC run like sludge but 3rd party AVs will make it run like a greyhound.

 

On a computer with a slow CPU, WD can cause very noticeable drops in performance at times. That has been my experience, on many computers. On the other hand, there are antiviruses which can slow down computers much more than WD does. But, for example, I find Panda, v11 of ESET products (not earlier versions) and Tencent to be considerably lighter than WD, with an absolute minimum impact on system performance, even with slower CPUs.

One thing I've noticed with WD, is that if you have very little running in the background then performance will often be a lot better than if you have a lot going on.

Your AMD CPU, is faster than the CPUs in any of my computers, and much faster than most of them.

 

I tried Panda Free just to see how it did in comparison to WD. I noticed it didn't turn off WD. I thought that was sort of weird. Most AVs shut WD off.

 

Something went wrong. WD should have been disabled.

 

I might give it another go. I would really like to see if there is a difference.