Viruses are capable of a wide range of things, ranging from stealing hard disk space to gaining access to your personal data or draining your CPU. There are plenty of anti-virus software available that can help protect your gadgets and avoid such issues. The key is to choose one that will have a minimal impact on your system’s performance. This is the primary factor that all of our antivirus products are tested against. The results below are dependent on the amount of time it takes for each program to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for example had a background impact of 6% while performing a full scanner, while ESET had an impact of 12%.
Avira, a German-based firm has a good reputation in our tests. It consistently scores above 90 percent in the three categories of Protection (False positives) and Performance (False Positives) and Usability. Its user interface offers a wide range of functionality, including a smart «firewall» as well as a variety of privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, rather than a set 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.
Essentware was formerly known as PCKeeper is a fairly new name to our tests. It uses the Avira Engine in the background. Overall it scored quite well. Its interface is easy to use and its performance was decent this month, though there were some issues with stability, mostly with scan jobs locking up – affected the score. However, detection was excellent and a flawless run through the certification sets earned it an VB100 award.