30 July 2008, 22:36 in Computing
Virus scanners
To me a virus scanner should be discrete and lightweight. It should not hog system resources or slow things down drastically, and it should not constantly pop up annoying messages to tell you to update or reboot your PC and so on. Of course it should also be effective at detecting and cleaning viruses!
For the last few years I have used Computer Associates VET anti-virus on my main PC at home. For the other Windows PCs I have at home I used the free edition of AVG. My VET subscription recently expired, and even though I’ve been happy with it, I spent some time evaluating some of the options.
BitDefender is quite cheap and many users are satisfied with it. However after a bit of searching the web I came across quite a few forum posts or articles where people had experienced problems on Windows Vista or when running games.
I use Kaspersky Anti-Virus at work. It appears to have good virus detection and it’s quite configurable, but it seems to slow the system down quite a bit.
AVG seems pretty good and I will continue to use the free edition on my spare PCs.
ESET NOD32 does not appear to be that well known; I hadn’t heard of it until recently. It has a reputation for being lightweight and unintrusive, and apparently has excellent virus detection. I liked it best out of the virus scanners I tried and ended up buying a license for my main PC which runs Windows Vista.
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