They can be anything from stealing your hard disk space to accessing your personal information and draining your CPU. There are a myriad of anti-virus applications available to safeguard your gadgets from these problems. The key is to choose one that will have a minimal impact on your system’s performance. This is the primary factor that all of our antivirus products are tested against. The results below are basing them on the length of time it takes each program to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for example, had a background effect of just 6% when scanning the entire system, while ESET had an effect of 12 percent.
Avira, a German-based company, has a solid reputation in our tests. It has consistently scored above 90% in all three categories: Protection (False positives) and Performance (False Positives) and Usability. The interface is user friendly and offers plenty of features, including a smart firewall as well as a variety of privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis rather than a predetermined 1-3-year period, which makes it simpler to cancel or adjust the subscription at any point without having to worry about second-year renewal price shocks.
A fairly new name in our tests, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper – uses the Avira engine underneath and generally scores quite well across the board. The interface and performance are both easy to use however some issues with stability which included scan jobs freezing up and causing the rating to drop. However, detection was good, and a perfect run through the certification sets earned it a VB100 award.