The virus can do many things, from stealing your hard disk space to access to your private information or draining your CPU. Thankfully, there are many antivirus tools available to help protect your devices from such issues. It is important to choose an anti-virus that has minimal impact on performance of your system. All of our antivirus software is tested against this. The results below are based on the amount of time it takes for each program to perform an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for example, had a background effect of just 6% when conducting a full scan while ESET had an effect of 12 percent.
The German-based Avira is a reputable company in our tests and consistently scores above 90% in all three categories: Performance, Protection and Usability (False Positives). Its user interface is easy to use and comes with a variety of functions, including a clever firewall and other privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis rather than a set 1-3 year period, which makes it much easier to cancel or alter the subscription at any point without worrying about 2nd year renewal price shocks.
Essentware, formerly known as PCKeeper is a fairly new name to our tests. It utilizes the Avira Engine in the background. Overall, it performed well. Its UI is simple to use and its performance was satisfactory this month, though a few stability issues – mostly related to scan jobs not being able to connect – dented the rating. The detection was good and a perfect run of the certification sets was rewarded with VB100.