There are so many virus guards out there and different people prefer different products. Personally I prefer ESET NOD32 and I thought maybe posting the reasons why I use it could help someone to decide which product to choose.
Before going further let me ask, Do you need a full security suite with Virus guard + Firewall + eMail scanner etc.. OR is a virus guard alone is enough?
If you have a router, then personally I don’t see the need of a 3rd party software firewall; Built in Windows firewall is more than enough because the router has a hardware firewall (unless you half bridge it or forward all ports). Using a 3rd party firewall slows you down and it may cause unexpected network errors too. Therefore I don’t use one, but the choice is up to you.
Here are some benchmark results. These tests were carried out by an independent testing organization, they have published very detailed reports with test results and how they tested each product. If you want more information follow the links I have given below.
Virus threat assessment tests
Retrospective/Proactive Tests
In the old days, most virus guards detected viruses using signatures and predefined behavioral patters, for this the virus guard had to know about the virus in order to detect it. But this technique is not very robust against new viruses, therefore these days virus guards are using intelligent techniques like genetic and heuristic techniques to detect even unknown viruses. Thersore even without knowing about a virus (through a virus definition update) scanners can detect malisous applications.
Retrospective/Proactive Test measures the virus guard’s ability to detect unknown viruses. For the test they have used old definition files with new viruses. Here are the overall results:
Note : Even though AVIRA and G Data have a high detection rate they have received a lower overall rating due to having many false alarms.
On-demand Comparative
These are the test results for standard on demand scans of known viruses (using latest definition files available at the time).
Performance tests
Why I picked NOD32
NOD32 was (and still is) one of the fastest scanning engines out there. A large part of the NOD32 scanning engine is written in assembly code, this gives the best performance at the lowers resource consumption. This is the main reason why I chose NOD32 several years back (it was undoubtedly fastest at that time) and stuck with it all this time. But now some other scanners like Norton is very close in performance but it doesn't have a high rating in some of the virus tests.
Second reason is obviously the protection it offers. Again NOD 32 lists at the top. Many preffer Kasperskey because that also provides lot of protection and considered one of the best Virusguards out there. But you can see it falls short of NOD32 in terms of both protection and performance (performance is much less).
Since NOD32 tops all the lists, I chose it
.
Before going further let me ask, Do you need a full security suite with Virus guard + Firewall + eMail scanner etc.. OR is a virus guard alone is enough?
If you have a router, then personally I don’t see the need of a 3rd party software firewall; Built in Windows firewall is more than enough because the router has a hardware firewall (unless you half bridge it or forward all ports). Using a 3rd party firewall slows you down and it may cause unexpected network errors too. Therefore I don’t use one, but the choice is up to you.
Here are some benchmark results. These tests were carried out by an independent testing organization, they have published very detailed reports with test results and how they tested each product. If you want more information follow the links I have given below.
Virus threat assessment tests
Retrospective/Proactive Tests
In the old days, most virus guards detected viruses using signatures and predefined behavioral patters, for this the virus guard had to know about the virus in order to detect it. But this technique is not very robust against new viruses, therefore these days virus guards are using intelligent techniques like genetic and heuristic techniques to detect even unknown viruses. Thersore even without knowing about a virus (through a virus definition update) scanners can detect malisous applications.
Retrospective/Proactive Test measures the virus guard’s ability to detect unknown viruses. For the test they have used old definition files with new viruses. Here are the overall results:
Note : Even though AVIRA and G Data have a high detection rate they have received a lower overall rating due to having many false alarms.
On-demand Comparative
These are the test results for standard on demand scans of known viruses (using latest definition files available at the time).
Performance tests
Lower is better
Why I picked NOD32
NOD32 was (and still is) one of the fastest scanning engines out there. A large part of the NOD32 scanning engine is written in assembly code, this gives the best performance at the lowers resource consumption. This is the main reason why I chose NOD32 several years back (it was undoubtedly fastest at that time) and stuck with it all this time. But now some other scanners like Norton is very close in performance but it doesn't have a high rating in some of the virus tests.
Second reason is obviously the protection it offers. Again NOD 32 lists at the top. Many preffer Kasperskey because that also provides lot of protection and considered one of the best Virusguards out there. But you can see it falls short of NOD32 in terms of both protection and performance (performance is much less).
Since NOD32 tops all the lists, I chose it
.
