I have used a number of Antivirus programs over the years. I was a big fan of Mcafee back in the DOS days, moved onto Nortons when it came with my PC (Threw it away when it got too bloated). Tried a number of others and then settled on AVG.
AVG was great. It was free, wasn\’t bloated like Norton was (I have been assured that the 2009 and 2010 versions are much better) and seemed to do everything, except custom scheduled scans, you needed to pay for that.
Over the last few years it has worked great for me and I have been through a number of versions, till the recent v8.
However, I noticed it too was getting a bit bloated, using memory and system resources that seemed a bit big while idle.
I thought I would try Avast.
It too is a free anti virus program, for non commercial use and has all of the current drop of shields including Instant Messaging, Web,Mail, Network and more.
Resource wise it was better, not to much between them, but it definitely used less memory than AVG. This was ideal for my laptop that only has 256mb of RAM.
After some toing and froing between versions, the newest version of Avast has been released, so installed this on the resource challenged laptop.
Well some of the initial tests have been quite stunning.
While the proof will be in the protection it provides (The previous versions seem to be good in that regard), the resource usage of this new system is quite staggering.
With AVG installed, the laptop idled once fully loaded at around 260mb (remember this only has 256mb of RAM)
With Avast this reduced to 195mb, around 65mb less. On such a tight resource budget this is huge. Updates and scans obviously take more cpu and RAM, but that is to be expected. Why waste resources when they are not needed.
Well done to Avast, they have made a good product even better, enough to get a WOW out of me!
