i’m sure you’ve heard this many times before: the primary claim against avast is its extreme use of resources. i have not heard the concrete details as to what resources are meant.
what resources are being referred to, and what does avast say about the claim that the avast software is inordinately resource hungry?
Hi nweissma
No I haven’t, but if you have and you’re not sure what they meant, you’ll first need to ask “what resources are meant. what resources are being referred to” of the people from whom you heard it. 
Where did you read this?
The guy that said this must be joking or just making FUD.
By comparison to many other AVs avast is relatively light on resources, as is confirmed by many when they switch to avast from another AV. Often the first thing they notice is that there system is more responsive.
Take your answer from your own experience you have been a forum member since April 27, 2007 so I assume you have at least that time of experience with avast.
Typically most people consider RAM as the major resource with CPU use also considered. The problem being you don’t say what is said so you can’t counter unsubstantiated claims with fact. Also you can’t compare apples with oranges if you don’t know that persons Operating System, etc. how they use their system or what they are doing when they imply that it is resource hungry, which it on my system it most certainly isn’t.
i have heard this complaint against avast several times, most recently from an it tech; and grisoft’s avg was the recommended/preferred av software because, they claim, grisoft’s avg is as effective as avast but does not consume such inordinate resources.
that having been said, i have been using avast for many months and have been extremely happy - it has saved my butt many, many times.
Sorry. I’m an ex AVG user. I’m not a newbie. Just to say that this is just advertisement of Grisoft. AVG has a lot of worse features than avast. Also it has (very few) better points. But, for sure, AVG has a very aggressive advertisement policy.
So do we 8)
Something I only recently found out from one of the Alwil team is that you don’t see all of the resources that AVG uses so it isn’t possible to compare. AVG uses some Kernel mode stuff which isn’t shown in Task Manager and that is why AVG ‘appears’ to use so little resources (RAM).
Not to mention it doesn’t have the same functionality so you can’t directly compare.
This is the true test user satisfaction and you can see if there is any impact on your system, e.g. it is very slow, that is truly what system resource usage would show up in its impact on your use of the computer.
Hi nweissma,
AVG scanner is inside the Windows kernel. I think this thread is what DavidR is referring to: http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30271.msg249933;topicseen#msg249933
On one of my PCs, I used the paid version of AVG Anti-Virus for two years and found it to be easy on resources. I upgraded to AVG Anti-Malware a year ago and found it to be heavy on resource use, performs a boot scan on every boot, but does well for surfing the web. I recently installed the AVG Anti-Malware on another one of my PCs that multitask three programs all day long and the AVG Anti-Malware brought that PC to its knees. I had to remove the AVG Anti-Malware in order for the applications to run well. I installed Avast with no ill effects on running the three multitask applications. There is nothing like success. Of course it is the on access anti-spyware component of the the AVG Anti-Malware that is eating up the resources. I would like to have an on access anti-spyware component as part of Avast provided it could be turned on and off separately from the on access anti-virus. That way the user could choose either component or both components depending on the need and the PC.
Whilst avast does catch quite a lot of spyware I like to have a specialist anti-spyware also. For me that is on-demand as I don’t want to tie up resources, but I also take pro-active measures to limit the chance I will become infected by spyware.
However, there are on-access anti-spyware applications that don’t seem to have the same impact you saw with avg anti-malware, SpywareTerminator is also free.
Me too… we asked this a lot of times
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