They are capable of doing a variety of things, ranging from stealing hard disk space to access to your personal data or draining your CPU. Fortunately, there are numerous antivirus tools available that can help protect your devices from such issues. It is essential to select an antivirus that has a minimal impact on system performance. Every antivirus program we offer is tested against this factor. The results below are basing them on the length of time it takes for each program to perform an operation. For example, Kaspersky Security Cloud Free had an impact on the background of only 6% while performing the full scan, while ESET had a slightly higher impact of 12 percent.
Germany-based Avira is well-established content in our tests and consistently performs well above the 90% mark in all three categories – Security, Performance and Usability (False Positives). Its UI is also user easy to use and comes with a variety of functions, including a clever firewall and other privacy tools. Avira subscriptions are priced monthly rather than for a set three-year period. This makes it easier to cancel your subscription or change the terms at anytime.
A relatively new name that we’ve tested, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper uses the Avira engine under the hood and generally scores fairly well across the spectrum. The interface is easy to use and its performance was acceptable this month, though a few stability issues – mainly with scan jobs locking up – reduced the score. However, detection was good, and a perfect run through the certification sets earned it an VB100 award.
