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.
Avast 6 free antivirus vs Microsoft Security Essentials.
- Thread starter Tommy
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bunyip783
Level 1
- Mar 1, 2011
- 132
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.
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.
bunyip783
Level 1
- Mar 1, 2011
- 132
bogdan said:I've mentioned itbogdan said:
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
Level 2
- Feb 25, 2011
- 1,314
bogdan
Level 1
- Jan 7, 2011
- 1,362
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
Level 2
- Feb 25, 2011
- 1,314
bunyip783 said:
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.
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.
Dejan
New Member
- Mar 3, 2011
- 559
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
Level 1
- Jan 7, 2011
- 1,362
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.
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.
ghost
Level 1
- Jan 16, 2011
- 132
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
Level 1
- Feb 24, 2011
- 497
- Status
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