A Better Anti-virus

This post will be a kind of work in progress as I dont have time to thoroughly compose it at the moment.

Over the past year I have been dealing with several highly disappointing antivirus programs. My biggest problem being that 95% of the antivirus suites available nearly clobber your pc in the quest to scan viruses - once installed the AV program just uses up all your CPU and RAM making your pc not so fun to use - whats worse the desease or the cure. Personally I dont even run an antivirus suite on my netbook, they kill my battery life, and I know pretty well to stay away from viruses (knock on silicon).

My favorite AV program for some time was AVG Free 7.5 which has just been completely abandoned for updates by AVG (upgrade asap to 8.5). I was a little disappointed when 8.0 came out using a bit more resources, and then 8.5 even worse, but I guess you need to keep up with the competition (viruses that is). For a free AV program AVG is pretty decent, and its relatively speedy still - note that the free version is for NON-commercial use only - meaning you must pay to use it at work.

Currently my preferred paid antivirus suite is NOD32 from ESET, although I am not quite thoroughly excited with it, it does seem to use a low amount of resources (and thats their moto) compared to most other AV programs, but its definitely not the 35 mb of ram advertised on their site.

Here is my no-no list either due to system hogs, or bad interface:

• Symantec / Norton Antivirus - anything they make - stay away
• McAfee - definitely stay away from their desktop apps, the corp versions are so-so.
• Kaspersky - totally shutdown a servers network connection at one site
• AVG Pro corp version- not bad, but not great, some sloppy design work on the admin side
• TrendMicro - what a mess
• eTrust Ez Antivirus - not very good at detection
• CA Computer Associates - same thing
• Clamwin - no active scanner, very dangerous
• Panda - tends to be too restrictive
• Sophos - not really a corporate competitor, but it works 'ok'
• Webroot - kind of a pig
• Spyware Doctor - severe system hog - remove this asap
• PC Tools Internet Security - definite resource hog also, get rid of it
• ParetoLogic Antivirus - resource hog

Heres a couple of reviews I found that dont really seem to have much basis, and maybe quite skewed, but I plan to make a first hand assessment at some point soon:

• http://www.2009softwarereviews.com/default.aspx?refer=2GAS&keyword=EAntivirus
• http://www.pc-scan.net/review/index.php?apid=A102420A&kwd=antivirus%20review

The latter site recommends Pareto Logic which I tried and found the above review to be a scam, that program is a ginormous memory hog.

Programs that I endorse:

• AVG Free 8.5
• Eset NOD32
• Panda Cloud Antivirus - the very best AV I have found to date, just needs network version
• Windows Defender - in addition to a normal antivirus program

Some that I definitely plan to check out:

• Avast antivirus
• Antivir
• Comodo Antivirus  **Did it, great product
• Panda Cloud Antivirus **Checked it- TOP NOTCH free product
• F-Prot
• Microsoft Forefront **Checked, unfortunately its not a good choice for most users

...more to come...

UPDATE:

I tried Comodo Internet Security which is a very impressive program, however, it is not perfect... The program is very thorough, it has an antivirus/spyware engine, and a full firewall, the installer gives you the option of installing one or both the AV and Firewall components, I opted out on the firewall. Once installed you can set the program to run in various modes depending on how hard you want it to work at detecting viruses (how much of your PCs resources you want it to use). During the normal use "out of the box" settings, it uses very little memory/CPU, a mere 30-35mb of RAM and no CPU, during a scan RAM usage remains the same and CPU floats between 2-10%. There is a "paranoid" mode which seems to scan with extreme scrutiny, using slightly more CPU. Now - the thing that prevents me from slapping this on just anyones PC, under the "normal mode" it monitors all activity and warns you when anything suspicous happens - ie a flash video creates a temp file - it will ask you to first confirm the action. I believe this can be minimized, but I havent dug quite deep enough yet. Some people that are annoyed by Vista's nagging confirmations may not deal well with this. But its options are very well layed out, it seems like it would be very good at detecting most any virus without taxing your resources:

...more to come...

NEW!!!: I found these charts below at this site, it DOES NOT mention a few that are worth mentioning such as AVG or Comodo Internet Security, both of which perform better than anything listed in the images below, although the data is definitely valid and worth noting:

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***UPDATE 5/10/09

Well I finally found something that is the very best at what it does. Panda Cloud Antivirus is a free virus scanner that only uses about 15 megabytes of ram and so far after installing on several client systems it seems to catch the viruses.

The cloud uses a new cutting edge technology of peer to peer virus prevention, all of the installations of this program subscribe to each other to prevent viruses and there is no such thing as automatic updates - its ALWAYS up to date!!! The options are very slimmed down, and the program never bothers you with stupid questions, it just works.

This is a great program except that its rather new and they have not yet developed a corporate version with centralize management. 

***UPDATE 8/1/2009 Panda stay away - unfortunately Panda has proven by some of my clients to be inefficient at preventing viruses. Back to Eset and AVG.

***Update 2/6/2010: Theres a new wolf in the pack, check out Security Essentials here.