I am switching from Bitdefender paid to Avast free. BD uses like 150 mb, I saw in Task Manager. I thought Bitdefender was cloud and used little to no resources but I guess not. Bitdefender didnt test as well but I am assuming that is on default settings. If I raise sensitvity, it should raise detection rates a point or two? Anyways, I am on a non admin acccount anyways so most viruses cannot install themselves.
@ando35 As I've stated a number of times before, memory usage by an antivirus, generally does not matter. Unless your system is short on RAM, then memory usage will not affect performance, and in some cases antiviruses using more memory perform better than ones keeping thier memory useage low, becuase they are keeping data in RAM rather than reguarly writing data back to the hard drive, to free up RAM, which actually hinders performance. If you've got enough RAM installed, it is high CPU and or disk usage will cause performance issues. I never look at RAM usage by security software becuase it simply does not matter.
I don't take too much notice of test results - too many variables. I'd suggest if the only problem you have with your AV is when you check Task Manager, stop checking Task Manager.
I forgot which version a while back, but BD premium products demoted its cloud to email SPAM filtering only. URL filtering via the cloud is by optional browser-specific ad-ons. BD Free is the only product still using cloud AV and system-wide URL filtering, up to Windows 8.1 - not compatible with 10.
I switched to Avast Free long ago. It is excellent on my old {vintage 1998} computer. My main security modus is to image often to a thumb driive, & retain 2-3 months of prior images. Ergo, I only use Avast to do (1) on-demand-scan of every new download, and (2) full-boot-time scans weekly.
Bitdefender is rated amongst the HIGHEST of all anti-virus software, just check it out at AVcomparatives or AV test
