Battle Which AV uses less battery?

fabiobr

Level 12
Thread author
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Mar 28, 2019
561
I bought a new laptop and the battery is not the best thing on it, so I'm looking for an Av which consumes less battery as possible.

I never had that issue since my main PC always been desktop, but now I have to think about it.

My laptop is to do work stuff.

Obs: My laptop came with McAfee trial for 30 days.
 

MacDefender

Level 16
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Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
Laptops are where there's no free lunch. Every CPU cycle used is something that consumes your battery life.

Look for ones that basically use a little CPU during your normal work as possible. Unfortunately in practice, it means these things consume a lot of battery, and you should look to see if your AV supports disabling them:
  • Realtime scans beyond on-execution/on-open (on-creation, on-access)
  • Scanning heavily changed but low risk areas like the browser cache (downloads that get executed are moved out of the browser cache to elsewhere)
  • Scanning all extensions
  • Periodic/background/startup scans
  • Network Filtering (SSL inspection and network stream filtering are all high CPU usage)
Of course, balance this with your desired level of protection.

In practice, I've found Kaspersky to be pretty high impact on battery life, Norton as well when network traffic is heavy (though Norton is better than Kaspersky at IMMEDIATELY stopping all background tasks when running on battery power). ESET is good if you disable network scanning (the SSL filtering aspect is fairly CPU heavy), but note that with ESET in particular, disabling network scanning severely reduces your protection against trojan dropper/downloader sort of threats where a highly obfuscated first stage downloads a much easier to identify second stage.
 

fabiobr

Level 12
Thread author
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Mar 28, 2019
561
Laptops are where there's no free lunch. Every CPU cycle used is something that consumes your battery life.

Look for ones that basically use a little CPU during your normal work as possible. Unfortunately in practice, it means these things consume a lot of battery, and you should look to see if your AV supports disabling them:
  • Realtime scans beyond on-execution/on-open (on-creation, on-access)
  • Scanning heavily changed but low risk areas like the browser cache (downloads that get executed are moved out of the browser cache to elsewhere)
  • Scanning all extensions
  • Periodic/background/startup scans
  • Network Filtering (SSL inspection and network stream filtering are all high CPU usage)
Of course, balance this with your desired level of protection.

In practice, I've found Kaspersky to be pretty high impact on battery life, Norton as well when network traffic is heavy (though Norton is better than Kaspersky at IMMEDIATELY stopping all background tasks when running on battery power). ESET is good if you disable network scanning (the SSL filtering aspect is fairly CPU heavy), but note that with ESET in particular, disabling network scanning severely reduces your protection against trojan dropper/downloader sort of threats where a highly obfuscated first stage downloads a much easier to identify second stage.
I was thinking on stay with McAfee (which comes with the laptop for 30 days) or move to ESET.

What do you think?
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
I was thinking on stay with McAfee (which comes with the laptop for 30 days) or move to ESET.

What do you think?
I don't have a lot of personal experience with McAfee and I don't like AVs where their track record isn't solid and consistent (McAfee's greatly improved recently but the same could not be said from the era where they were Intel-branded).

ESET's a solid choice though and a good lightweight pick for a laptop. I would probably just use NOD32 though -- their firewall is a bit of a kludge to deal with, and the Windows firewall's adaptive switching between private / public network I've found actually works, unlike the ESET one which seems to block more things than I'd like.
 

mlnevese

Level 26
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
May 3, 2015
1,531
Most modern AVs will detect when a notebook is running on battery and adapt its tasks. Kaspersky, for instance, will stop running scheduled tasks to save battery.

CPU cycles do not use as much battery as Wi-Fi so pure cloud solutions will use your battery faster. Most products won't use more than 0,2% of your processor power unless actively scanning, though.

For a computer that will run on battery power and disconnected for the most time I'd use something with strong local signatures such as Avira, ESET or Kaspersky.
 

kev216

Level 21
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Honorary Member
Top Poster
Content Creator
Well-known
Aug 6, 2014
1,044
I've tried multiple AV's on my laptop and after a lot of switching, in my opinion Panda is the best in terms of lightness and battery life. I can easily use my laptop up to more than an hour longer than with other AV software with similar computer usage. Sophos (after a few days of settling down) and Bullguard are good too and would be in my top 3, but Panda comes first. Bitdefender, Mcafee, Kaspersky and Norton on the other hand were quite heavy on battery on my system.
 

MegenM

Level 3
Well-known
Jun 8, 2020
119
Nothing can be more frustrating than losing power when you want it the most.

I use Bitdefender now and have used McAfee in the past.

Based on my experience, Bitdefender is better than McAfee with profiles enabled.
I hope this helps, in case you are comparing between these 2 antiviruses.
 

Vitali Ortzi

Level 22
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
Dec 12, 2016
1,147
Try comodo cruel sister or voodoo shield.
as only deafult deny won't waste your battery.
You can't use an AV as it is always uses CPU usage.
But a recommendation from me would be to undervolt the laptop.
 

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