- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
If you’re still on Windows XP, and statistics show that at least 23 percent of you are still running this old operating system, it might be a challenge to protect your computer and stay away from malware or any other threat found online.
Security institute AV-TEST conducted a new series of tests to determine which is the best anti-virus solution for Windows XP, despite the end of support that took place in April this year.
The results pretty much speak for themselves: Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab, and Panda Cloud Free are the three best solutions out of the 23 included in these tests. As far as corporate solutions are concerned, Trend Micro achieved the biggest score, followed by Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab and McAfee.
“The most difficult test regimen for all security packages is the detection of malware. While the packages in the real world testing were required to detect and liquidate some 160 brand-new specimens of malicious code, the AV-TEST reference set included an additional ambuscade of 24,000 known malware threats,” AV-TEST explained.
“Among the desktop solutions, 13 of the 23 products achieved the highest point score of 6 in the Protection category! An additional 8 packages achieved 4 to 5.5 points. Only Ahnlab and Microsoft each scored a mere 0.5 points.”
One of the problems signaled by AV-TEST is the system load that some of these security products are experiencing when installed on Windows XP.
According to these results, only security products belonging to Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab and Panda were very light on system resources on Windows XP, while others had an impact on system performance. Avira, F-Secure, and Symantec products require more system resources to work properly, the tests show.
Most manufacturers have already announced extended support for Windows XP, so their apps will continue to work on this particular operating system for at least one more year, even though no official support is offered.
“These vendors unanimously stated that the overhead remained the same, and that they would not neglect customer care and security one iota in the future. Thus, according to the manufacturers, there will always be an updated client specially geared to Windows XP. The newly published client versions for 2015 are also compatible with Windows XP SP3,” AV-TEST revealed.
At this point, most security software manufacturers are still offering applications supporting Windows XP, so have a look at Softpedia’s anti-virus category to find a tool to keep your data protected while browsing the web.
