New 'Protect Your PC For Free: No-cost Anti-Virus and Other Software' discussion

GunJack

for info, BT's security is Mcrapee based, TT's is F-Secure and I think BitDefender does VM's.

BTW, none of which I'd consider putting on any of my pc's

RussJK

GunJack wrote: »

for info, BT's security is Mcrapee based, TT's is F-Secure and I think BitDefender does VM's.

BTW, none of which I'd consider putting on any of my pc's

F-Secure's the lightest and most unobtrusive I've used, tested it on my netbook out of curiosity awhile ago.

Agree with the rest though

GunJack

russ - F-Secure still isn't as reliable as avira/avast even if it is lightweight. Out of interest, I tried your Panda cloud recommendation t'other week, on my "toy" lappy - it was considerably heftier on resources than avast How did f-secure compare to those two??

RussJK

GunJack wrote: »

russ - F-Secure still isn't as reliable as avira/avast even if it is lightweight. Out of interest, I tried your Panda cloud recommendation t'other week, on my "toy" lappy - it was considerably heftier on resources than avast How did f-secure compare to those two??

Reliable in what way? Last I checked it was okay with FPs, and had good detections. Overall Avira has the best antivirus engine IMO due to the heuristics though.

Weird, had good feedback from others with a nearly identical setup to mine. Did you install Panda from a fresh image, or after uninstalling Avast? Only ask because Avast never uninstalls cleanly even with the aswclean tool, and appremover makes a mess of it too.

F-Secure was lightest. Avira/Panda no real discernible differences. Avast was a bit heavier than the rest and I took it off the netbook after 2 months (but kept it on the laptop until it gave me my first BSOD in years). I never went into taking the kind of measurements that raymond.cc did, just on how well the PC ran (which is all that matters to me anyway).

GunJack

^^^ I suppose I'm still a bit biased towards avira/avast Last time I looked F-secure detections were still not quite as good, my meaning for reliable above. Running on toy lappy (1.4 Celeron M, 256MB RAM !!! ) Panda seemed to take a lot of resource compared to avast, and noticably slowed the machine down (go on, say it, it couldn't get much slower ..it's not that bad, honest) but it was installed after a system restore to before avast was installed. Original owner had Mcrapee on it ( :eek: with such low resources) and I had cleaned it out pretty thoroughly before avast install.

Think I might do a factory restore on it soon and start afresh....it's good testing platform 'coz if you can make it run reasonably at that spec, a better pc with a tested suite of tweaks and software will pretty much fly

RussJK

One thing that might explain it, IIRC Panda does an initial indexing of the system - either all at once, or in bits and pieces over time. That'll cause a bit of sluggishness until it's done.

Agreed that low powered systems are great for testing stuff.

kwikbreaks

Avira nearly got its marching orders from me recently with those pesky slide up windows offering some extra protection for using some toolbar or other. Luckily it seems if you refuse often enough it gives up. Trouble is I've got several machines running it so kept seeing them.

GunJack

quick update.....

I tried the trial of F-Secure IS2011, and it's a resource hog !!! Over avast/win firewall, it's an extra 8 processes running and over 100Meg commit charge.....that's not good - even with really good detections don't think I'll consider this for a while

RussJK

Interesting, no good for an old machine then. What were the specs of the machine? And how did it run with f-secure on?

TBH I never looked at the memory usage, it ran fast on my netbook (2gb memory) so I didn't worry. Things like Rapport that plainly slow things down, that's when I look and criticise for using more resources than something like Avast.

Unless memory is restricted, high memory usage isn't necessarily a bad sign for overall system performance. I mean take FF5 - some of that high ram usage (on machines with it available) is for a kind of ram drive for cache. I tested FF5 on a client's machine with 512mb ram, and it used 45mb, but on a machine with memory to spare it'll use 200mb easily.

GunJack

russ, spec of machine as per post #276. Interesting about FF, I found it soooo slow on my (proper) pc, especially compared to Opera.