From hacked ad servers to malicious Facebook pages, the web is a dangerous place, and so it’s vital that you install good antivirus software to protect you from harm.
And this doesn’t have to mean paying a bulky annual subscription for the rest of your life, as there are plenty of free security tools which claim they have what it takes to keep you safe.
Do these tools really deliver on what they promise, though? To find out, we took ten popular packages and put them through a gruelling series of tests, measuring their speeds, assessing detection rates, and finding out exactly how their installation affected our test PC’s performance.
And if you sometimes feel that all free antivirus tools are more or less the same, then our results will prove a real surprise.
If you’re tired of antivirus packages slowing down your PC, for instance, then the good news is that some are really lightweight. But choose unwisely and you could find your boot times extended by 20 seconds, and Firefox launching up to 5 times more slowly than before.
Scan times are important, too. So you’ll probably want to know which of our test packages was the slowest, and which tool completed its tests 22 times more quickly.
And if you’re interested in accuracy and reliability then we’ve the detection rate scores you need, and some surprising reports of major reliability issues, including one package which refused to install updates, and another that proved unable to complete a single scan.
Which is the best free antivirus package, then? Read on to see just what we’ve uncovered.
How we tested
The test process started at installation: we checked the size of the installer, the time it took for the installation process to complete, and the hard drive footprint afterwards.
And after rebooting, we began looking for any performance impact on our trial PC. We measured this by checking our system boot time, Firefox and Outlook launch times; every figure was taken 8 times, the first three dropped (it’s normal for these to be slower) and the others averaged to produce a final result.
Our test environment contained malware grabbed from a variety of sources – newly infected URLs, malicious email attachments and more – and we next set our test programs to scanning these.
The results and scan times were recorded, but it’s not enough to do these just once: many antivirus tools now include intelligent optimisations, for example not checking files again unless they’ve changed, and these need to be assessed. So we scanned the same environment three times with each tool, just to look for any improvements.
And while these definitive figures were useful, we also had to consider the more complex issues which arise in any software review: the range of features, the interface, usability issues and any quirks or problems that we might have noticed.
These tests don’t cover everything, of course. In particular, we weren’t trying to test how antivirus packages protect against malicious websites, or brand new, previously undiscovered dangers. You can see our full test results in this PDF.
There’s still plenty of useful information here, though – read on to find the best free antivirus tool for you.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/FA2Bq0JGPZs/story01.htm