Confused about Free Avira Antvir and Free Avast

I need to find another antivirus software and I was thinking of either Avira Free or Avast Free.

Unfortunately I'm a little confused about something.

I was told that Avira uses less system resources than Avast. But I don't see how. For XP, Avira requires 192 MB RAM and Avast requires 64 MB but 128 are recommended. So wouldn't that mean Avast uses less resources? Or am I completely misunderstanding this? If I am, please explain.

Also, I thought Avira required a lot less than 192 MB RAM. One of the download sites linked off the Avira site say it requires 20 MB RAM. What's up with that?

 

Those are HW requirements (a.k.a. minimal HW specifications, not really important since OS requirements are generally way above those for modern Windows-based OS if they are supposed to be reasonably usable). IOW, they are not a description of how much RAM the SW uses. Avira definitely doesn't use 192MB of RAM, otherwise I'd get rid of it very fast.

 

Dont mix min. ram required and ram usage and harddisk space... As said before min ram required has nothing to to with how much it uses. Maby some of the userers in here using these products can enlighten you with the numbers on their computers (which can differ from on your computer).

The best thing is to install both products and see what runs best on your computer. A product that uses etc 40 mb ram can be running lighter than a product that uses 25 Not always a logic in that.

Test them both and youll find out what runs best
(IMO they run eaqually good on the machines i've been testing, but I prefer Avast!)

 

+1 on this... Low RAM usage means nothing if the realtime AV scanner itself has 30%+ payload on CPU slowing down everything to a crawl even on quad-core box (greetings to Symantec )

 

Avira runs very light, and has 3 processes with a very low combined memory usage (look at "Working Set" for the outlined processes, which equals memory usage in Windows' built-in taskmanager). It's less than 10MB in total, and is therefor lighter than even so-called light AVs like Dr.Web etc.

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/1962/clipboard01rl0.png

This system only has 384MB, which is very little in today's standards, but still runs pretty well because of Avira. The problem is not Avira but the memory usage of Windows itself + all the other running programs you may have on your system


EDIT: I forgot, Avira also has 2 drivers loaded (avgio.sys & avgntflt.sys) that doesn't show up in task managers, but combined they are only ~60kB.

 

While I don't disagree at all with this, I'd just like to clarify that what is intended is to try them each in turn.
Don't try to install both together.
Give them a few days each, or as long as it takes for you to get familiar with the programs, check the scanning, updates etc.
They're both good. Which one you choose will depend on your preference (of course) and the way each program runs on your computer.

 

Ran both Avira and Avast on my system and Avast produced a lower Commit Charge or lower memory usage. That said both are pretty light and you should try both before you decide.