Battle Norton Antivirus Plus or Emsisoft

[Tibro]

Hello,

I bought a new powerful PC and need new security solution. I want to enjoy performance so first of all it would be low system impact, light.
I frequently work with large number of files (documents, pictures etc.), with remoted computers and intraweb solutions via browsers. Heavy multitasking of course. Tried windows defender but i felt it really heavy when i tried to use large files.

My new PC is:
Intel i5 9400
16 GB DDR4 RAM
SSD
Windows 10 Pro

 

[notabot]

How often do you download sketchy things that less than thousands of others have downloaded?

SONAR is mostly just a cloud reputation scanner but because SONAR has so many users (with Norton being extremely popular both in enterprise and home installations and everyone is automatically opted into contributing to SONAR), it works practically as well as an AV engine just on reputation scanning alone.

Norton's got many other layers of protection too, so perhaps it's not surprising that you don't get personally targeted by a zero day.

How does SONAR's reputation system compare to smartscreen? one can use smartscreen with another AV/not WD so what value does SONAR add given that windows natively offers a cloud reputation system ( not to mention beyond smartscreen there's the ASR rule on age prevalence etc but this becomes inactive if you change realtime protection to something else)

 

[bjm_]

View attachment 229569
In SONAR Advanced Mode, there is "Automatic" and "Aggressive."
If you move SONAR to 'Aggressive' and download new updates to things.... I'd be surprised if you didn't get activity.
I used to do research on certain topics at home... and I had to turn 'Aggressive' back to 'Automatic' as I had too much activity.

I'm on Aggressive. Yes, Aggressive prompts more notifications.

Configure SONAR Advanced Mode
[...]To block high-certainty threats, and receive notifications for low-certainty threats with few suspicious characteristics, move the switch to Aggressive.
This setting is highly sensitive and might cause legitimate files to be identified as threats. It is recommended for advanced users only. DOCID: v26386563

 

[MacDefender]

How does SONAR's reputation system compare to smartscreen? one can use smartscreen with another AV/not WD so what value does SONAR add given that windows natively offers a cloud reputation system ( not to mention beyond smartscreen there's the ASR rule on age prevalence etc but this becomes inactive if you change realtime protection to something else)

SONAR is better. It tells you much more information about when the binary was first seen, and not just the maliciousness but also the crash rate + resource consumption of the binary.

Plus SONAR, unlike Windows Smartscreen, doesn't mark every Microsoft-directed piracy tool as malicious, which is super annoying. Conveniently they don't seem to care about things like Adobe and VMWare piracy tools.

 

[bjm_]

Possibly you are a very cautious user

Yes, possibly.
Thanks