Antivirus performance is the most important characteristic for most users as well as the quality of protection itself. This characteristic is the one that both home users and corporate customers pay their attention to when buying an antivirus. Nobody needs powerful but too resource-intensive protection with which you just cannot use your computer for doing what you would like to.

If the protection quality is very hard to evaluate all by yourself it is quite easy to notice immediately when the operating system and other programs slowdown or file copying and web-pages downloading "hang up". A reliable and practically unnoticeable antivirus is the biggest dream of every usual user.

The objective of this test is to show how personal antivirus software influences the typical operations performed by the user, slows down its work and utilizes the system resources. 

While performing the tests, we measured and compared parameters having a direct influence on the user's perception of antivirus performance, namely:

1. Operation system boot time.
2. Memory & CPU used by antivirus software.
3. File copying performance (on-access antivirus scanner performance testing).
4. Scan speed (on-demand antivirus scanner performance testing).
5. Boot time for the five most popular office applications.

The test results give a clear idea of the performance of antivirus represented in the market. Having compared this information with Anti-Malware.ru test results, every user can make an informed choice in favor of this or that antivirus solution.

Methodology used for antivirus performance testing »
Analysis of the test results and awards »

Contents:
- Introduction
- Antivirus effect on the operation system boot time
- Antivirus resource-intensiveness comparison
- On-access antivirus scanner performance comparison
- On-demand antivirus scanner performance comparison
- Antivirus performance comparison for office applications

Key results of the testing

Award	The fastest antivirus on-access scanners	The fastest antivirus   on-demand scanners	The fastest office application antivirus scanners
Platinum Award	Avast	Avira	-
Gold Award	Avira Norton BitDefender Sophos AVG Kaspersky Panda	Kaspersky Norton BitDefender F-Secure Outpost	BitDefender Avira McAfee Microsoft Eset Avast AVG
Silver Award	Trend Micro F-Secure Outpost	Trend Micro Avast Sophos AVG Panda	Dr.Web VirusBlokAda Sophos
Bronze Award	Eset	McAfee VirusBlokAda Eset	Outpost Panda
No award	McAfee Microsoft Dr.Web VirusBlokAda	Microsoft Dr.Web	Kaspersky Norton F-Secure Trend Micro

 Key results from the antivirus antivirus preformance test in HTML»

Complete results for each antivirus product are available only in Microsoft Excel format:

Complete testing results in Microsoft Excel format »