[Low footprint] Nod32 version 3, 4 or 5?

I have a number of outdated systems, mainly running windows XP, which ran Nod32 2.7 brilliantly, until Eset decided to quit supporting that version with updates some time ago.

I have switched to Avast! Free for the time being, as AV-comparitives shows that it's relatively similar in speed, performance and quality.

However, I have always had good exp. with Nod32 and would like to try it again. In the meantime, version 3, 4 and 5 have emerged and I'm now a bit confused which to choose.

Can someone shed some experience/light on this matter? Thank you.

 

It is definitely a wise idea to upgrade to v5.2 or try out the new beta 6. V2 has quite low malware detection ratio and protection capabilities compared to its successors.
Should you have any problems with v. 5.2, feel free to report them here or ask a question you might have. V. 5.2 is the last release version and addresses all issues reported with older versions.

 

Marcos, thanks for your reply. Can you give me stats or pref. a comparison between the different versions?

Somehow I have the feeling the newer version got much more bloated and therefore will have a big impact on these low resource machines. Please prove me otherwise? Thanks .

 

as a user and repair tech i can honestly tell you i have clients with v5.2 running with as little as 512mb on older systems with xp. are they lightning fast... no but no system with 512mb will be av or not. but they have not seemed to have slowed any from what they were prior. the oldest i would even recc would be v4 anyway. but imo i would always use the latest version of any av.

 

In fact Im using only 512 in the old machine and is lightning fast

 

FYI.
I am using ESS V5 on a PC with only 512MB of RAM and it's as light as V4, using 85MB of RAM (virtual set) just as usual

 

I have been running NOD32 since v 2.x and have been through 3.x, 4.x and now 5.2.9.1. I have not noticed any slowing down or greater impact on memory as I have moved through the versions.

My system is XP SP3, 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM, which was state of the art when I built it eight years ago! The machine still seems lightning fast to me, including for photo and video processing and some intensive mathematical stuff which graphically displays the result of tens of millions of calculations. NOD32 seems to have little if any impact on any running processes.

In my last full system scan, by the way, scanning my C drive, 5.2.9.1 took 36min for 316,000 objects.