I doubt there is such a thing as a lite antivirus. They have always been a drag . I have an older machine and have tried pretty much all of them at some stage . Its rather like dragging a bucket of water behind your surf board.
After testing most of these antivirus I have come to the conclusion that Trend Micro is by far the lightest.
It was using a maximum of 15MB of ram. I felt absolutely no slowdown compared to before the install. Everything ran just as fast as it did before I installed it. It never used more than 1% CPU. The only thing that came close to how light it was for me was VIPRE.
i have tried prevx (paid) and avast 6 (free), i can confirm for me anyway, that avast is way lighter than prevx. dont believe me? use prevx paid and open a movie file in VLC player and time it, now do the same with avast. avast wins every time for me. so i have now uninstalled prevx and gone naked for now, but will soon put avast back on, especially since the prevx beta is too late for me now. anyone want a 30 day left prevx paid key?
isn't that the ultimate way of testing? using it on your on computer and noticing how long is takes to do things that you do quite often? if there is a better way then please let me know
Prevx should be lighter because it only uses cloud-based heuristic and doesn't need to be like traditional AVs.
Panda cloud is the lightest, yeah maybe Avast and Eset is kinda light, but as time goes by and there are some instances that they use a lot of resources, but now, the one that really surprise me is how light this G data 2012 is, as light as Avast, considering it uses Bitdefender and Avast's Engine
have you even used prevx paid and avast? yes SHOULD be lighter but it is not. how do you define light? uses less ram and cpu cycles? or how fast it lets you get on with working with your comp? i choose the latter. i don't care if an antivirus uses 300mb's of ram because i have plenty more to spare, i will never understand why people use ram resources to measure how 'light' a program is. all i care about is how fast i get my work done. the above is not directed at you per say but to alot of others who think that way.
What I meant was that you need to do more testing than just start a movie in VLC . That's one test but Prevx may be faster on other tasks were Avast is slower.
Well let's say like this, I currently got 512MB of RAM. Don't you think I care if my AV uses 300MB of RAM then?
impossibility as windows/antivirus would not allocate that much ram to the program if you only have that much ram. page file comes into use here and that is why i said 'for me anyway' in my original post
but what if that's the only thing i use 1 of my computers for? well that and browsing the web. i have a different machine that i use to create videos and game with. on this comp the thing i do the most is use VLC to test video files. avast is faster than prevx when a computer is used this way. dont get me wrong, i love prevx but i have come to learnt that when i actually time things, prevx is not as fast as i first thought. now on my gaming pc, prevx is definitely faster than avast as the thing i do the most on my gaming pc is (surprise surprise) gaming. i think this due to the fact prevx does not scan on access alot (mostly on execute). avast scans most things it has not cached. so different results for different situations. i use my non gaming pc regularly so right now (for me) avast is the faster product
No problem my friend. I understand and respect your views. And if Avast is best for what you use that particular PC for then go with Avast of course.
I used an AV once wich used around 250MB (for a short time) while updating the Virus signature database. And as a result the PC hang it self almost.
No it was by designed Actually it was like that during several version updates, so no it wasn't a bug unfortunately.
But this topic is discussing about the "lightest AV" not "fastest AV".If no,may you explain to me what circumstance then only we call it as "Lightest AV"?I need your clarification.One more thing,I realize that Prevx will authorizes your files whenver you open a program,that's probably why you feel that your computer working slightly slower after the installation of Prevx.Thanks.
I've been using Prevx as my main AV for a while now, but decided to test avast! on my 64-bit Windows XP (secondary system on my primary computer). It's running smoothly - comparable to prevx in general performance. My initial impression is that prevx may be a little bit lighter in most respects, but its file authentication feature can really slow down the initial launch times of certain programs -- avast fares a lot better in that regard. On the other hand, with avast! I'm getting (preemptive?) pop-ups suggesting I open certain applications in a sandbox even though I don't necessarily want to run them at all. For example, I was browsing a directory containing recent downloads, one of which was metapad.exe (a potential notepad replacement), when I received the attached alert (which requires a response) -- I didn't actually click on metapad. Is that normal with avast? I don't want to create a rule for it since it's just in a temporary directory for files while I decide if/when/where/how to install or run them, yet every time I move the mouse cursor over metapad.exe or certain other executables/installers, I get the screen shown in the attachment. (To be fair, Prevx also scans files in directories I'm browsing, but it only issues alerts if it detects malware and these alerts don't necessarily require interaction).
