Do Virus Scanners Slow Down Your System?

[perrycs]

Darn... when I created my account my original post was changed to Anonymous... sigh... well, I'll repost it here...

I fix computers for a living and have cleaned out approx 6,000 machines since the beginning myself. Up until 2003 Norton was the best and after that Norton fell sharply. I still won't use norton yet customers keep buying it and I keep removing it. WHY? It does a horrible job of detecting viruses in the real world. I laugh at tests saying it detects stuff - I dont know how they get their results but Norton hasnt been a good product since 2003. I have removed it and installed Avast and found Avast caught piles more than Norton and Malwarebytes catches more than Avast. However, I use Avast for the AV and Malwarebytes only for removing already infected machines. Kaspersky seems to be pretty good but I cant make a proper determination (2000+ customers with Avast, 6 with Kaspersky). As much as I like Avast it does seem to have problems keeping "Antivirus 2009" and those types of infections out of the computer but then again.. so does almost every other AV out there.

I have installed Avast on ALL my customers machines and everyone is happy. NO product is 100%. I still don't trust Norton YET but it seems after all these years of a crappy product they are SLOWLY fixing it. 2003-2009 their product sucked. Bloatware. Horrible boot times. However, compared to Avast Norton is horrible. Run a scan with norton. No viruses? Really? Run a scan with something else... FOUND piles of Viruses. When Norton fixes their product up more... then I'll consider them a serious contender again. And it doesnt matter which copy of Norton you use... Corporate or Home User. Horrible compared to other products. Mcaffee is also another product I would never touch and probably even lower than Norton would be Microsoft Essentials. Ugh.. where do I start? I find the free ones superior to Norton, McAfee, MS Essentials. In order.. Avast, AVG, Kasperky, and so on.

Hope this helps someone.

 

[oren levy]

what about eset? and what about 32 bit windows....
different chipset nay Chang the whole story
as my experience, as a computer builder nod 32 and microsoft will have the most responsive computers, this article sucks!!!
when u have slow machine with slow hard drive i mean 20ms access time u can cry when you have avg installed, people come to fix computer as they are slow mostly case avg free antivirus!!!
many time the CPU stuck 60% of antivirus processing after awhile
u simply say nothing! not to mention the ability to handle a virus!
guys its a review of antivirus!!! first. then preformance
oren.

 

[netspiderz]

Why Avast Antivirus wasn't included? I believe that many of us want to compare Avast with the other antiviruses.

 

[netspiderz]

Why wasn't Avast Antivirus included? I believe that many of us want to compare Avast with the other antiviruses.

 

[user 18]

Malwarebytes, anyone?

 

[netspiderz]

Probably the tests done in this article apply to freshly installed Operating Systems. As computer tech, I find that in the real world is different. Antiviruses slow down computers a lot, but only in certain cases. There are many reasons why a computer could become slow and sometimes antiviruses could be one of the cause. I wouldn't really apply this article benchmarks to real situations. I believe that those benchmarks are valid only on freshly installed Operating Systems. This is my opinion, which doesn't come from benchmarks, but from working experience.

 

[The_Prophecy]

About what I would have expected, but an interesting read regardless.

 

[dv1795]

How did I know McAffee would suck?

 

[daved1948]

Oddly, in my experience (maybe 1,000 PCs over the last 16 years), these results fly in the face of what I see day-to-day.

Perhaps it's the "Suite" that flat-lines a user's PC when Symantec or McAfee dumps a firewall, spam filter, malware Website checker, antivirus and whatever else into the processes.

Perhaps it's the cost of running in limited RAM, and the poorer performance of what a slightly outdated platform (let's say for instance, a four-year-old Dell GX280 running Windows XP Pro 32-bit with 2GB of RAM) might be able to deliver - which creates such an obvious slowdown in usability when McAfee's "Suite" is installed verses when it's removed that throws me off. This, compared against your to-the-wall 64-bit, 4GB, SATA-II screamer that "most" homebodies do not currently own.

I would take serious issue with your results in the real world of less bleeding edge users, which probably covers about 70% (no footnotes) of all corporate and home users at this time.

Malicious threats have grown exponentially over the last ten years. But the installed base has to amortize systems they already have, so I doubt the average user has a machine like the one you used. Could it be then, the real-world performance hit experienced by my clients is the result of the typical software bloat that occurs as vendors do their best to respond these? The one thing I know is...on the boxes in use - often HP or Dell GX 5xx, 6xx, 7xx and the 280 profiled above which represent what users are stuck with, your results don't match mine.

My solution, born of sixteen years of experience with Microsoft operating systems, eliminates much of the goo, and at the same time returns a performance boost that puts big smiles on my clients faces, while keeping them very, very safe.

1) Microsoft Security Essentials...fast, efficient, able to damn malware and quickly replace damaged, infected or modified system components regardless of what's got a lock on them. My witness is it can get rid of stuff nothing else can, and it's about time Microsoft provided a fix that works for their own gullible OS, which is clearly the true Achilles' heel of computing today.

2) OpenDNS...keeps users from going to many places they shouldn't. Heck, just doing this is enough to eliminate 90% of all attacks. If you tune this to stop access to hate, chat, social networking, jokes, sex and adult sites you're well on your way to keeping a completely clean environment.

3) Firefox and Google Chrome with Adblock extension. Both these browsers also now include site filtering through the Anti Phishing Working Group which includes the who's-who of security organizations dedicated to stomping out this most damaging vulnerability of the Internet.

4) Microsoft's own internal firewall. A good tool, and now even better in Windows 7.

That's it.

 

[computer_guy]

I would take this article with a grain of salt. Security related software products are heavily dependant on disk IO, memory usage and performance. This article is inconclusive and the only people that will buy this article will be computer sales staff. There significant overhead with any antivirus security suite software. Don't only go by this article I encourage you to see for yourself and also compare with other reviews.

 

[computer_guy]

I am very much in agreement with daved1948's post. Very well put and it's obvious he speaks from experience. Some other recommendations I would also suggest for decent security related software products would be the one time paid version of Malwarebytes for realtime anti-malware protection.

For a file system antivirus solution: I have yet to see any other product stand up to Symantec Endpoint Security 11 MR6. (more memory intensive)

But for a home user that requires more Trojan/Worm/Malware protection: The paid version of ESET NOD32 would suffice nicely.

 

[Guest]

• This is an interesting discussion. Security programs have been known to slow down Windows PCs, causing users to struggle with a longer boot-up process, a less responsive workflow, slower gameplay and reduced media application performance, etc. I’m sure you have noticed that antivurus companies like Symantec and Microsoft have made an effort to mention their program’s minimal impact on PC speed in their product information. I wanted to see if these statements were accurate so I actually ran a number of benchmarks to see if these anti-virus programs impact PC performance. If you’d like to take a look, I put together this blog post explaining the test criteria and I’ll publish the results there soon: http://bit.ly/eVsWOZ

 

[jeffery6803]

to make this test more available to what real world use would be should have been tested on hard drive that is 60% full of files... testing on hdd with few programs and few files will tell you nothing of actual real world performance just that on a relative new system with few files it will not be a drag

 

[WR2]

It might have been a good idea to test the system with a bad case of malware and virus infestation just to point why it's not all that bad an idea to give up a little performance to avoid some really nasty problems.

 

[Guest]

Ok i know this article is over a year old but its still here and still relevant - but i do have to disagree slightly compared to my system, Here's my own little benchmark - I open VLC 'for the first time today' to play a video clip (takes 15 sec on my wristwatch, and i can see also it scanning all the DLL plugins)
Open vlc 5 minutes later, same file - loads instantly (because the DLL files are marked as clear already, so my Avast doesnt re-scan them "transient caching")

so the 1st time i load anything it really is slowed down, and this applies to all games and applications.

So thats my own real world test - but yeah, nice article anyway