The virus can do various things, from taking over hard disk space to access to your personal information or draining your CPU. There are a myriad of anti-virus applications available to guard your devices from the dangers. It is important to choose one that will have a minimal impact on the performance of your system. This is a key factor that all of our antivirus products are tested against. The results below are based on the amount of time it takes each program to perform an operation. For instance, Kaspersky Security Cloud Free had a background impact of just 6percent when performing the full scan, while ESET had a slightly greater impact of 12%.
Avira, a German-based firm has a great reputation in our tests. It consistently scores above 90 percent in all three categories: Protection (False positives) and Performance (False Positives) and Usability. The user interface has a wealth of functionality and features, including a sophisticated “firewall” as well as a variety of privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis rather than a predetermined 1-3 year period, which makes it simpler to cancel or modify the subscription at any time, without worrying about 2nd year renewal price shocks.
A relatively new name in our tests, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper uses the Avira engine underneath and generally scores fairly well across the range. Its performance and user interface are both simple to use, but a few stability problems – mainly scan jobs freezing up and causing the rating to drop. The detection was official statement good and a perfect run of the certification sets was rewarded with VB100.
