Do Antivirus Suites Impact Your PC's Performance?

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I still think Norton's a great program. It installs very easily, has a lot of customization, and it actually impacts my computer very little. I think these tests were a bit off. AV's always gonna be slower. I think the test should be redone with a normal computer, not an ultra-fast one.
 

shqtth

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I can't remember the last time I got spyware of a virus, so I don't use any. I have microsoft, and kaspersky on my sister and will doa scan when I want, or use kaspersky for scanning my customers computers. FInd kaspersky find the most virus/spyware on customers computers.

THere is Kaspersky Antivirus and Kaspersky Internet Security. Kaspersky Antivirus works best for my needs as Visa has a good firewall already. But I recommend the Internet Security version to protect my dumb customers who run into a virus almost every day. ;)
 

shqtth

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If you runa single core PC or netbook, McAffe/Samantec/Norton kills the system with high cpu usage. And Windows Live Once care was bad at that too, but Microsoft Essentials is way better then Live One care.
 

goldplated

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You should also do a speed download test on high end internet, I have 100mbit cable with Telstra which is very good quality on a 4Ghz i7 PC and with Kaspersky enabled a good download source goes from around 85mbits/sec to about 55mbits/sec EVERYTIME!

I just disable Kaspersky and boom they are screaming fast a gain, enable kaspersky and it is slow.
I don't know what Kaspersky do but you really should look into it, my theory is that they tweak their AV for ADSL users only and if you add latency into the download then Kaspersky just ruins your speeds.

I did extensive testing on this from many download sources for over a week and I guarantee you will find something interesting here.

Just posted this again? I posted waiting 5 mins looking around don't see my post, sorry it this just slow.
 
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Our company had been using McAfee for quite some time now and always my problem with this AV software is that it continues to slow down the boot times of my desktop PC even with a dual-core Intel CPU. On the other hand, I installed Avast AV on my desktop at home which has a lower specs than the one at the office but boot time of my home PC is even better. And to verify what's eating up CPU proc times, I usually open the Task Manager everytime I get these long boot times and most of the time I see the McAfee service using up most of the cpu power. I just can't understand why it seemd like its scanning the same processes all the time when you boot your pc when the AV virus is always running while you're using it anyway and so every input is already verified even on USB drives. I mean can't it just remember the clean files that was previously scanned. Are there no intelligence in this particular AV software that you have to scan the same files all the time and considering that you are not turning off the McAfee AV when you're using the pc. Probably, if you turned-off the AV manually then I guess its okay for the McAfee AV to rescan them when you reboot otherwise it should avoid scanning them again. Just probably some of my frustrations with McAfee AV. I don't experience the same with Avast or previously I used AVG. Or is this because these are free AV.
 
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Guys, AV software kills your *hdd*, not your cpu. I work in a corporate environment were full scan is run thrice-weekly (during the day, of course, since systems are supposed to be off at night). While that happens, the system takes ages to perform the most simple tasks, because everything has to wait on *hdd* to process AV I/O.
 

RaptorHunter

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Unless your boiling water at non-atmospheric pressures, then it is impossible to heat water past 212 degrees Fahrenheit. All of the excess energy you put into the system will convert water into steam leaving the remaining water at exactly 212 degrees.
 

oxiide

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There's six pages of comments, so I apologize if its been suggested already: A more interesting test might be to start up a virus scan and then run a CPU-heavy game benchmark on top of it, comparing results between different AV products. Boiling it down to an FPS hit would be much more useful information than this, in my opinion.
 
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You missed the most important thing of all:
Increased internet latency!
Speedtest.net under the same setup if you still have it PLEASE!!!
 

_Soulless_

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Congrats for the review. The only thing i didn't understand is why did you performed a comparison between AV and Internet Security, when most (if not every company) have both suites. The booting times, and the performance are affected since there are more components to start and to work with. Other than that, good work =)
 
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The Norton AV full scan on an i5 system with 4GB of ram on an enrypted HDD brings system to stop for about 4 hours!!!!!

And the IT says av does not impact performance, and that the disc encryption does not impact performance, but together.... they just make this PC slower than 386 (CPU usage is low, but one can not work because HDD wait time is a few seconds).

 

disna

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when We want buy software specially security software must carefully many items ,

performance , validation , easy use , best quality product , best support ,

i think when we want buy AV haveonly few brands and can use giggest security products .

TM ,SY ,SO ,MC ,WE
 

bogarts

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