Leaving aside the sarcasm of my previous post in this thread, what troubled me about the Poll results (and remember that the poll was well crafted enough so that multiple choices could be made) was that the System Impact choice doubled that of efficacy in malware detection. One would hope that effectiveness would alsways be at LEAST number 1, but sadly it was not. This pretty much mirrors the comments on that other Forum where the "Lightness" of a product seems to outweigh whether or not the product works (always makes me sigh...).
I think the choice about detection wasn't worded in the correct way (no offence meant).
"I only care that it's effective against threats" means "I don't care about anything else" and I think this sentence is a bit too much (who will accept to have a PC taking ages to boot up, launch apps, make scan and such?).
If the wording had been "effectiveness against threats", I think it would have taken much more votes.
Now we do have an essential response here:
I voted "impact on system" because I assume "effectiveness against threats" as granted
On what exactly is this assumption based? Far too frequently are decisions made by "lightness", GUI colors, or whether the cute Panda still exists in the Taskbar (although the latter may have been only me...). I personally would hope to see a reason specified for effectiveness, then other considerations added.
What I have learnt in the last couple months of testing of several security products is that "lightness" is really something personal, which may change from user to user (and sometimes for the same user in different moments).
Windows Defender has always been a no-choice for me because it has always been a resources-hog, but then I decided to give it another try and I was very surprised about its lightness.
On the other hand, I have always been happy with Comodo Firewall since 2008 on Vista and Windows 7. But when Windows 10 came out, Comodo Firewall has only given troubles to me, so I had to look elsewhere.
I personally think a security product is light when it doesn't have any noticeable impact on pc boot time, pc shutdown time, RAM, CPU and disk usage, app launch, webpage browsing.
The meaning of "effectiveness" is, again, very personal: if you like to surf dubious websites or install any new app you find or test malware, then you need something really strong (default-deny, lockdown and such). If you know how to double check a link or an attachment in an e-mail, you surf only well-known websites and install only well-known softwares, then you can go with a "light" solution (and make a back up from time to time just in case)
