It is absolutely mandatory for a Windows user to install some kind of anti-malware on his computer. Its true that antivirus is generally memory intensive but if you are not using any kind of antivirus on an internet connected computer or a computer frequently accessing external usb drives, then you are asking for trouble. Traditionally the antivirus field has been dominated by the likes of Symantec’s Norton Antivirus and McAfee Antivirus. But of late these two giants have been losing market share to ESET NOD32, Kaspersky, BitDefender, AVG, Avast, etc. Should you stay with Norton & McAfee or is it time to move on?
There are 3 primary reasons why I would recommend you to use Avast Antivirus more than any other solution available in the market:
1. Any user of the latest versions of Norton or McAfee will agree that these softwares have become bloatwares which significantly slow down your computer. Not only are the installation file sizes huge, more importantly they eat a lot of system RAM. In this area ESET NOD32 and Avast Antivirus emerge as the winners by being far less memory hogs than the competetion.
2. The virus detection rates of various antivirus vendors based on independent testers like AV Online & VB100 show that the detection rates of Avast are on par with other heavyweights like Norton, McAfee & Kaspersky. Antivirus detection is moving away from virus signatures based scanning to behavioural scanning. In fact as far as technique is concerned ESET NOD32 has the best heuristic scanning engine which enables it to detect viruses even without having the absolute latest signatures.
3. Based on the 2 factors above ESET NOD32 & Avast Antivirus are better than Norton or McAfee because while they have equal or more capable virus scanning & detection, they don’t slow down the machine. So why choose Avast? Simple. Because out of the two, while Avast has a free version available, NOD32 does not. So if you have money to spend, you can choose NOD32. But if you are one out of many who would not like to spend money on buying an antivirus & subscribing to paid updates, then you would choose Avast.
There are other free alternatives to Avast in the form of AVG Free Edition & Avira Antivir Personal Edition. But the latest update from Avast in the form of Avast Antivirus 4.8 adds anti-spyware, anti-rootkit support in addition to anti-virus. AVG’s free version does not include anti-spyware & anti-rootkit features whereas Avira Antivir’s free version does not protect against email viruses in popular mail programs, a feature which is present in Avast Antivirus Home Edition!
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