jh said:
I've been using AVG (paid) version 7 these past two years and have been
very happy with it. However, as it's time to renew my subscription I've
been having second thoughts. I keep reading that Kaspersky is the best AV
product. What are the specialists recommendations (David, Ian, Art, Duane
and others)? Must have a light footprint though.
Although coverage isn't the sole measure by which you should judge an AV
product, 87% average (and only 81% for Windows) for AVG is far too low. Try
to stay above 95% (which eliminates Trend, AVG, AntiVir, Avast, and Dr. Web
as choices). Of course, how susceptible you are to getting infected is
primarily based on YOUR behavior.
http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2005_08.php
Although McAfee gets high coverage, I've stayed away from that product line
because of the high incidence of host where performance becomes
significantly degraded when using McAfee. Although some users will bitch
about Norton products being bloated, that is most often due to how the user
configured the product, like enabling Parental Control for NIS which loads a
large table into memory (and often they are talking about the suite rather
than just NAV). Kaspersky is good but I dislike that they use ADS
(alternate data streams) in files to record their previous results when
scanning a file (to eliminate having to scan it again if the file has not
changed since the last scan by checking the hash code it recorded during its
last scan). If you uninstall Kaspersky, all that superfluous data remains
in the ADS of the files (i.e., it's a dirty uninstall), but obviously that
is only a concern when you uninstall the product.
Since most AV products provide trial versions, you can do the testing
yourself as to which has the least footprint, least performance degradation,
and is a product that you will actually use and know how to configure and
handle during pest discovery.
