Choosing the Right Windows Antivirus Solution

One thing I’ve always hated about the “big, bad” antivirus solutions like Norton and Mcafee, is their tendency to literally wrestle with my system’s resources, taking up a tremendous amount of RAM space and processor time. Sure, that’d be all fine and dandy if I just used my computer a few times a day to check my e-mail and chat with my friends, but that’s just not the case. I need something that just works, stays in the background and only bugs me when there is something of importance I need to respond to — and of course, it also needs to be capable of removing viruses.

I’ve tried out a few of the big ones: F-Secure, BitDefender, BullGuard, AntiVir, Mcafee, Avast, Norman, F-Prot, Norton Professional, AVG, Panda, PC-Cillin, etc… - but when it comes to “just working” and working damn well, my undisputed favorites are ESET NOD32 and Kaspersky. While NOD32 is marginally worse at detecting viruses (~95% compared to Kaspersky’s ~99%), it has powerful heuristics scanning (helps detect “in-the-wild” viruses, before they’re officially added to the virus definition database and the client is updated), and it is more quiet than Kaspersky. Kaspersky, however, detected 99.62% of 147,000 viruses in a large test conducted by Virus.gr, offers a lot more than NOD32, and it’s even available for free as the AOL-branded “Active Virus Shield“. Active Virus Shield is an AOL-branded clone of the commercial Kaspersky Antivirus with some features removed - If you’re just looking for good antivirus protection, it’s more than fit for the job.

The only real difference between Kaspersky Antivirus and Active Virus Shield is that Kaspersky (the commercial one) has a feature called Proactive Defense. It takes measures to stop unknown viruses before they break in, by e.g. monitoring Windows Registry changes, application hijacking attempts and what not. Another feature of Kaspersky and Active Virus Shield is that they scale based on CPU usage, so they won’t slow down your system when you’re running something demanding.

My recommendations:

  • If you don’t mind shaking up a few bucks, want ultra-fast performance with minimal annoyance - go with NOD32 from ESET.
  • If you still have money to spare, want the absolute maximum protection including paranoia features, go with Kaspersky Antivirus.
  • If you don’t want to pay and just want maximum virus protection with little interruption, go with Active Virus Shield from AOL.

For further reading, see the article “And the best antivirus is…” at CyberNet Technology News that focuses on the results of the 147.000 virus detection test.

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