Battle Avast 6 free antivirus vs Microsoft Security Essentials.

[Tommy]

I would go with Avast free antivirus due to all it's features and I think it eats less RAM this Microsoft Security Essentials. Microsoft Security Essentials is really just an antivirus with nothing added in my opinion.

 

[bunyip783]

I think most people are confused with what makes a better antivirus from the majority of posts I have seen. For example, it has more features and is therefore better. Most of the zero day protection features are still young and almost unnoticeable in a real world test situation from what I have seen, so far. So mostly it's just about comparing signatures and standard of the heuristics. It has been proven that Microsoft Security Essentials has less false positives, another thing that NO ONE has mentioned. This is also a very important thing to consider when choosing an antivirus program. The signatures also seem to be on par with each other mostly. This is why I personally prefer MSE.

Don't get me wrong, Avast is lighter, and is a very decent product, but most people seem to have no justification for their decisions.

 

[bogdan]

When it came out it had really good detection rate (maybe it still has) and almost no false-positives. I am sure that the low FP rate is still there because I don't think that Microsoft can afford having many false-positives (companies will complain if their files are detected as malicious).

I've mentioned it

 

[bunyip783]

When it came out it had really good detection rate (maybe it still has) and almost no false-positives. I am sure that the low FP rate is still there because I don't think that Microsoft can afford having many false-positives (companies will complain if their files are detected as malicious).

I've mentioned it

I wasn't talking to you specifically, but most people just said they liked it better because it had more features and mentioned nothing about how effective it actually is, the false positives of either programs or personal experiences they may have had with each. Their arguments lacked detail. I was referring to most people, not you .

 

[Valentin N]

I think most people are confused with what makes a better antivirus from the majority of posts I have seen. For example, it has more features and is therefore better. Most of the zero day protection features are still young and almost unnoticeable in a real world test situation from what I have seen, so far. So mostly it's just about comparing signatures and standard of the heuristics. It has been proven that Microsoft Security Essentials has less false positives, another thing that NO ONE has mentioned. This is also a very important thing to consider when choosing an antivirus program. The signatures also seem to be on par with each other mostly. This is why I personally prefer MSE.

Don't get me wrong, Avast is lighter, and is a very decent product, but most people seem to have no justification for their decisions.

I wonder why people are so against FP???? It's better than having an infection.

 

[bogdan]

Not only low FP but also good detection means better heuristics and better signatures. Consider this simple example: one product detects every upx packed executable as heur.packed.upx. Another one takes time and care to unpack files and actually see if they are malicious. They'll probably both detect malware but the first one will also have a bunch of false positives. Avira also has a high FP rate but in tests they usually require that their detection of packed executable to be disabled (see AV-Comparatives reports).

 

[Valentin N]

@bogdan I get what you are saying but I hope you get what I am saying as well

 

[HeffeD]

I think most people are confused with what makes a better antivirus from the majority of posts I have seen. For example, it has more features and is therefore better.

I think perhaps you're putting words in people's mouths. :sarcastic:

Obviously no one would pick Avast if it had more bells and whistles, but the AV engine sucked. There's obviously more to someone's criteria than features, (at least I hope...) even if they don't specifically state all of their deciding factors.

 

[Tweak]

Although I left details out of why I chose it if anyone cares to know I base my opinion mainly off personal experiences due to what I see when repairing a PC, more of the MSE infected computers cross my path and those that use or switch to Avast have experienced less issues as a whole.

 

[bunyip783]

I think most people are confused with what makes a better antivirus from the majority of posts I have seen. For example, it has more features and is therefore better.

I think perhaps you're putting words in people's mouths. :sarcastic:

Obviously no one would pick Avast if it had more bells and whistles, but the AV engine sucked. There's obviously more to someone's criteria than features, (at least I hope...) even if they don't specifically state all of their deciding factors.

I wasn't putting words it people's mouths, actually. The majority of the posts did just say they like Avast because it has more features.

Although I left details out of why I chose it if anyone cares to know I base my opinion mainly off personal experiences due to what I see when repairing a PC, more of the MSE infected computers cross my path and those that use or switch to Avast have experienced less issues as a whole.

This was more what I had in mind when wanting people to state their opinions.

 

[Tommy]

Well I mean what's the point of an antivirus that lacks self protection? If Avast misses something then it still might be able to still work if the malware is trying to kill it. If Microsoft Security Essentials misses something and the Malware tries to kill it then it's dead.

 

[Dejan]

I wasn't talking to you specifically, but most people just said they liked it better because it had more features and mentioned nothing about how effective it actually is, the false positives of either programs or personal experiences they may have had with each. Their arguments lacked detail. I was referring to most people, not you.

By features, I didn't mean all the new shiny things, but the things that actually do help with security. The sandbox for one does, as well as the WebRep add-on (although it's still young). It's actually logical, what good is a program that has so many features, but can't do what it's made to do? I had some pretty good experiences with both MSE and Avast, so yeah :money:

 

[bogdan]

I've temporarily replaced avast with MSE to see how it improved since the last time I installed it on a real machine.
Memory usage is still a bit high. The Private WS (what Task Manages in IE7 shows as RAM Usage) is around 50 MB on my machine while idle. But the system doesn't seem to be slowed down by it (as I felt before) so this is an improvement.
The full scan takes a long time to complete, basically you'll have to let your computer on over the night to perform it. But it is a thorough scan that doesn't exclude certain file types by default.

As for the self-protection...this is somewhat debatable. To be able to stop MSE, malware needs administrator privileges. At that point there are allot of other things malware can do to your system and an antivirus might not be able to stop it anyway. My recommendation is to use a standard account to prevent this from happening.

As for the extra features, the two products have some common ones: avast has a Network Shield while MSE has a Network Inspections System, the new version of avast has a Behavior Shield, mse has one too. In both cases they do not show pop-ups like threatfire does, for example so you might still need extra protection. I still feel that avast has the potential to offer better protection once the sandbox works as I suppose it should, while MSE relies on users not disabling UAC or running with a standard account. Avast's protection against malicious websites does an excellent job while MSE lets browsers offering a similar feature to do their job.

 

[Ink]

As for the extra features, the two products have some common ones: avast has a Network Shield while MSE has a Network Inspections System

MSE's Network Inspections System only works with Internet Explorer, correct?

 

[bogdan]

No, it scans network traffic trying to block any network based attacks. It runs as a separate process taking up 6 MB. From what I know it is only available on Win7 and Vista.

 

[Ink]

Sorry, I've mistaken it for another feature.

Do you know any thing about this?

 

[bogdan]

That is a IE addon installed by MSE beta. It was not installed with version 2.0.657.0 that I currently have. I don't have much use for it anyway since I do not use IE.

 

[ghost]

I chose Avast based on it's protection modules. The fact that they are giving away this product for free shows that they deserve our help. Maybe they are not the best (based on independent and official tests) in protection/detection but comparing to MSE they are waving from the distance.

 

[LaserWraith]

I chose Avast based on it's protection modules. The fact that they are giving away this product for free shows that they deserve our help. Maybe they are not the best (based on independent and official tests) in protection/detection but comparing to MSE they are waving from the distance.

They deserve our "help"? Um...how will we help them?

 

[ghost]

Helping them with Web-Rep, submitting undetected malware, whatever you could do. It's not an obligation, just an example.

 

[bogdan]

On the other hand Microsoft offers MSE for free even for small businesses. I'll assume the role of MSE defender