Microsoft AV software is “very fast”

First off, I hope you all had a great Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanza… We had our son David home from his group home for the weekend and it was great. Looking forward to a better new year…

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Back to business…..

An organization called AV-Comparatives.org has published a report on the speed of various anti-virus software. It’s important that you understand that they are talking about the impact on performance only. This report says nothing about the effectiveness of the vendors’ programs.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/performance-tests

While not the best (i.e., the least impact on performance), Microsoft Security Essentials did very well, especially compared to the various “free” programs. It finished higher than several retail programs (Avast, Symantec, ESET, McAfee, AVG)

To be honest, I don’t think it is the best solution out there. My personal preference these days is Kaspersky Internet Security 2010. However, for a lot of folks, paying $60+ is more than they want to pay. Assuming that the computer is running Vista or Windows 7, I’m comfortable setting the “average” end user with the built-in firewall and MS Security Essentials.

My reasoning is that most firewalls are just too complicated for the average person. More often than not, the alerts are just plain incomprehensible for most folks and they end up allowing the program the access requested. In effect, they are rendering the firewall worthless. So far, I’ve not seen any reports that the MS AV solution is not completely acceptable. What we need to monitor in the future is how quickly and effectively MS keeps up with the continually escalating ware with the malware programmers…