Keep it up avast! team

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hello Everyone

I have been testing avast! Home, Antivir Personal and AVG Free edition with maximum focus on the extent to which each one brings down the “snappiness” of a low-powered notebook running Vista Home Premium.
I have carried out these tests for over 2 months. The details of the testbed are as follows:

  1. Intel Celeron 1.86 Ghz, Intel 965 GM Chipset, 2 GB DDR2 553 MHz RAM, 80 GB TOSHIBA SATA HDD.
  2. Three installs of Vista Home Premium SP1, installed from the same image, completely patched with Office and Windows updates.
  3. Following tweaks have been made to the OS image - scheduled scanning by Windows Defender is turned off, scheduled defragmentation by Windows Disk Defragmenter is turned off, indexing has been limited to the Start menu only, System Restore is turned off.
  4. Only 3 apps are allowed on startup - Windows Defender, Sidebar and the installed Antivirus.
  5. No other security application, real-time or otherwise is installed.

Observations (listed as best performer,mediocre performer,worst performer):

  1. Cold Boot Time : avast!,Antivir,AVG
  2. Reboot Time : avast!,Antivir,AVG
  3. Explorer(browsing a folder having 200 executable files) : avast!, Antivir, AVG (this indicates the time AV takes to free up the explorer to be handled by the user, (I hope some of you get it))
  4. Scanning a folder having 50 MP3s, 50 JPEGs, 50 AVIs, 25 PPTs, 25 XLSs, 25 DOCs and 25 PDFs : Antivir, AVG, avast!
  5. Using(launching, opening new tab, browsing, downloading) IE: avast!, Antivir, AVG.
  6. Updates(frequency, failures and required user interaction) : Antivir wins on frequency, AVG wins on least number of unsuccessful updates and avast! wins on superb detection of network connectivity and total transparency, thereby performing in the most user friendly way.
  7. Killer feature (Antivirs detection vs AVGs Link Scanner vs avast!s Boot-time scan) : Antivirs high detection comes at the price of high FPs; AVGs Link Scanner has been released as a stand-alone product. That leaves us with a feature that should be made mandatory in all AV apps - the Boot Time scan. avast! wins hands down.

There are some other criteria I would like to include, but I wished to be thorough with these first. Please post any other criteria you wish to be included.

P.S. I hope this good work continues with version 5.

2

I can tell you a thing that Avast! in the three that you said its the best fastest scanner because AV-Comparative have tested it and rate it more fast than avg,avira and many more :slight_smile:

I hope you will be patient in July 2009 there a version 5 of Avast! who will be out :slight_smile: We all are impatient but if u want a good security suite then its take the time that its will :slight_smile:

Thank for let us that you like Avast!

Mr.Agent

3

Welcome to avast forums.
Good to know about your tests. Enjoy avast experience :wink:

4

I am very sorry to contradict you sir, but the only genuine performance test conducted by av-comparatives.org in October 2008 (report available here http://av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/performance/performance08a.pdf) shows following characteristics when considering default settings

  1. File copy test - Avira beats avast!
  2. Archiving and Unarchiving - Avira beats avast!
  3. Encoding/Transcoding - Avira beats avast!
  4. Boot Time - avast! beats Avira
    I do not see a scanning time comparative in that report. Would you please be gracious enough to point me towards a substantial evidence backing up your statement?
5

Sorry but you gived me a test of october 2008 and look at this test its more recent http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report21.pdf

I think we dont have talking about the same test well i can say Avast! 5 im sure he will beat Avira.

6

My Bad; thank you sir for pointing me out to the correct test. I did not know that the people at av-comparatives.org included on-demand scanning performance in their February comparative. And yes, I do wish and hope avast! 5 beats others.