AV-Comparatives: Real World Protection Test - July 2016

Hi Mac
The only computer where WD is installed with Windows 10 is my fast one (the specifications in my signature). We all know that any AV can behave differently with different machines for all sorts of reasons (conflicts, configurations etc..) and it is therefore imperative to have a trial period before buying.

If it is light as a feather on your machine (and I certainly believe you) you don't have any reason to pay for one. However tests done by AV Comparatives didn't find it as light as one might expect for a product that is incorporated with Windows. Again one could argue that AV Comparatives didn't test it with hundreds of machines which lead us to the usual conclusion that our personal experience is the best judge.
WD is improving its detection, the day it won't affect the performance of the OS I will definitely activate it.

 

And no false positives

 

There's no security product with 100% detection and zero false positives. Just look at this nice FP - a benign Filecoder decoder which is detected by 35 AVs at VT:~Results removed per Forum Policy.~

 

Hi Osaban. Yours is definitely a fast machine which in theory shouldn't have problems running any security solution existent. But I also notice in your sig that you run additional security apps parallely which makes me wonder if those can be affecting your overall performance when running WD. In my case, I never had other security apps other than a standalone antivirus (never liked 'suites' of any kind) because I don't consider them necessary. I own licenses for Avira, Kaspersky, WD (lol) and Emsisoft, being the latter the one I felt the least 'heavy', so to speak, of the four mentioned. Still, I ended sacrificing performance (and superb detection rate) of EAM for the unobtrusiveness of WD

 

Hi Mac
Actually the performance impact I experienced with WD could not have been affected by other applications as I have twice upgraded my machine, first from Win 8 to 8.1 and then from Win 8.1 to 10. In both instances, to avoid any possible interference I had uninstalled Avira, Sandboxie, and even Shadow Defender. Avira would be the first to be re-installed and disabling WD would clearly show an improvement in speed. Perhaps there might be other factors involved from a hardware perspective, Kaspersky for example is very heavy with some machines and very light with others, a trial period is the only way to find out...

 

It has been my experience on a large number of computers that unless you have a very fast CPU, Windows Defender will have a very noticable system impact. These are computers which have no other security software installed, and often have clean installs of Windows. On one hand, WD is not the heaviest antivirus I've come across, but on the other hand, 99% of the time I replace if with something lighter.

I'm always surpised when I hear people say how light it is, as this has not been my experience, even with the new Windows 10 Anniversary Update. I wonder if people who find it light, and don't have high end CPUs would find that their computer would run noticably faster if they disabled it.

 

No not in my case, its very light here but when i try it i use it on its own. As its part of windows it should and does not cause any impact i notice.

 

Hi Osaban

You are correct, no matter the positive/negative reviews of a product, there is no way to predict how an antivirus will impact on one's system, and trial versions come into play here. I hope soon I can invest on a ssd for both my lap and desktop pcs, this would supposedly improve performance dramatically on my systems and just then my current view on the "heaviness" of some AVs could change.

Best regards!

 

Switching to a SSD will make a massive difference in performance, but will not make any difference to how heavy an antivirus is. The only difference with a SSD with antiviruses will be shorter scan times.

 

Shorter scan times and shorter access times which will improve your performance.

 

That has not been my experience. Maybe the length of the slowdowns will be decreased, but that is all.

 

Agreed.

 

An antivirus which causes noticable slowdowns with a hard drive will also cause noticable slowdowns with a SSD. Perhaps the slowdowns will be for a shorter period of time, but they will still be there. An SSD will not make a heavy antivirus light. For example if I was to uninstall my current antivirus, Tencent PC Manager, and switch to Windows Defender, not only would my system take much longer to boot, but also, my system would run much slower, even though I have a SSD. The only way to fix the slowdowns if I was to stay with Windows Defender would be to put my SSD in a laptop with a faster CPU.

 

I've had an SSD for the past 3 years, and an SSD feels "normal" now. That being said, I can still tell my system slowed to all hell when I tried out Bitdefender, Trend Micro and Fortinet. I'm on Webroot right now with Zemana Anti-Logger and nothing else feels as light as this.

 

Thanks. Differing experiences among users here so I guess I'll have to find out by myself then...

 

If an antivirus makes your computer slower due to high CPU use, then it will do the same with a SSD. Perhaps, the period of high CPU use will be shorter because the antivirus is able to read data from the hard drive quicker. But, while files are being scanned the CPU use will be the same with both a hard drive and a SSD.

The other cause of slowdowns is high disk CPU. Once again having a SSD will not eliminate this. It will just make the period of high disk usage shorter.

What you want, is an antivirus which does not have either high CPU or disk usage, so you can avoid any signifcant system impact.

 

I'm not much of a watcher of those levels myself, I only care the general performance of my systems when an AV is installed. In my case, Emsisoft AM meet this criteria but still, as I said earlier, I prefer to sacrifice a little bit of performance and 'apparently' higher detection (have my reasons for saying this) for the simplicity and unobtrusiveness of Windows Defender.

 

Dude, on my system which I will post below, on Windows 10, when I open a folder that has custom image icons, the icons load in slow motion, every single time, Windows Defender causes a huge performance hit on my laptop. The moment I disable it I feel I'm like on a different computer due to how snappy my system feels. It surprises me so much when people on forums say how light WD is.

Also, there is a big bug now with Windows 10, if I try to update the WD Definitions while connected to my VPN, the update would fail and WD would disable itself until I reboot again.

System Specs:

EUROCOM Sky X9E - Intel Skylake i7-6700K @ 4.4GHz | G.SKILL Ripjaws 64GB DDR4 3000MHz. RAM | GeForce GTX 980 8.0GB GDDR5 | Sound Blaster 3D Audio | 2x Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD + 2x Samsung Spinpoint 5400 RPM 2TB HDD | Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 | 17.3" LG LP173WF4-SPF1 IPS FHD Matte Screen (G-SYNC) | Logitech G602 Wireless Gaming Mouse | 2x330W AC Power Adapters | Windows 10 Pro

 

I just had a ssd put in my old win7 pc. I just ran defraggler and it show i have a lot of fragments. Should i defrag my new kingston ssd.

 

Never ever defrag an SSD! http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/298108-32-defragging-year-never

 

In short - no you shouldn't. Especially if Windows didn't "recognize" it as SSD yet.

 

Does an SSD require defragmenting like an HDD?
No. SSDs never need to be defragmented. Defragmenting an SSD can actually reduce the life of an SSD. If your system is set up to defragment automatically, you should disable or turn off defragmentation when using an SSD. Some operating systems will defragment automatically, so this feature should be disabled for Kingston solid-state drives
https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/ssd_faq

 

Thanks for the info. I just turned off my win 7 scheduled defragging was was turned on.. A chrome redirect got me the last time i manually updated chrome. I thought i was ok until the next morning mu pc would not boot. I had someone put a fully updated win 7 back on and told him i wanted a ssd so he gave me a V300 120 GB kingston.

 

This guy loaded up java 8 on my new sdd. I think i uninstalled this years ago on my computer. Java is a security risk and i should uninstall it right.

 

Yes, if not needed (which is very likely) uninstall it ASAP.