They are capable of doing various things, from stealing hard disk space to access to your private information or draining your CPU. There are a myriad of anti-virus applications available to safeguard your gadgets from these problems. It is important to choose an antivirus that has a minimal impact on the system performance. This is one of the main factors that all of our antivirus products are tested against. The results are based on the time it takes each program to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for instance had a background effect of 6% when scanning the entire system, while ESET had an effect of 12 percent.
The German-based Avira is well-known in our tests and consistently scores over 90% in all three categories – Security, Performance and Usability (False Positives). Its UI offers a lot of functionality that includes a smart “firewall” and a range of privacy tools. Avira subscriptions are priced per month rather than for a fixed 1-3 year period. This makes it much easier to cancel your subscription or make adjustments at anytime.
A relatively new name that we’ve tested, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper utilizes the Avira engine underneath and generally scores pretty well across the spectrum. Its interface is simple to use and its performance was decent in the month of March, however some stability issues – mostly related to scan jobs locking up have lowered the rating. However, detection was good and a flawless run through the certification sets maintain transparency in corporate finance earned it the VB100 award.
