Avira vs MSE

[Muse]

I had to cool my heals yesterday in my dentist's waiting room and picked up the June 2012 (I think) issue of Consumer Reports and looked for interesting articles. I found several, one of which dealt with security software for the PC. Their recommendation was Avira Free, scoring 62. At number 4 (last in the group of 4) was MSE, scoring 56.

I have no idea of they know what they're doing there, I mean the team of people who evaluated the security software at CR. They did note that Avira occasionally nags you to upgrade to the $19.95 more fully featured version, a main reason I switched to MSE. More so, I was sick of the Avira popups that I saw very frequently when it upgraded its data or executable. A bigger reason I switched to MSE was confidence I've seen in this forum in its capabilities. Avira used to get a lot of approval here, but I believe that largely disappeared. MSE, OTOH, seems to pretty much run in the background and doesn't bother me. People have said that MSE has a small footprint, not a resource hog.

Well, is Avira really superior, enough to use it instead? What do you like in free AV for the PC?

 

[lxskllr]

I like Avira, and when I ran Windows, it was my first choice. I don't have full confidence in MSE. I had Avira installed for my mother, but she was confused by the popups. They had a different one once, and she didn't know how to handle it, so I switched her to MSE. I wasn't comfortable with that, so I switched her to Ubuntu. In other words, my lack of confidence in MSE led to me installing a new O/S.

 

[Cardio]

I have used MS Security Essentials since it came out and have had not a single problem of any kind. It has caught several items and has allowed none thru...… Don't know what more you could ask.

 

[Muse]

I have used MS Security Essentials since it came out and have had not a single problem of any kind. It has caught several items and has allowed none thru...… Don't know what more you could ask.

MSE is very transparent. You'd never know you're running it, in contrast to AVG or Avira with their frequent popups. Popups! I get them all the time and as you know, you rarely are in the mood to be distracted. There are enough distractions already when computing. Any unnecessary popups make me look askance at any software.

 

[nemesismk2]

I've never had any problems with MS Security Essentials and I have been using it since it was first released

 

[Six]

I used to be a fan of Avira til all the pop ups. They're all good enough, but lately AVG is the best. AVG can remove stuff the others cannot. Anyone know specifically why these modern antivirus software will not run in safe mode?

 

[mikeymikec]

The 'Which?' magazine reviewed a load of security products in recently-ish with an article title that suggested that they were going to look into whether you can get a perfectly decent free security product. They then ignored that in the article and proceeded to give all the free products low ratings and paid-for products high ratings with no explanation.

I used to recommend Avast free, but it's "free" moniker should probably be altered to "we're going to try and persuade you to upgrade as often as we possibly can, as well as showing you random bits of advertising". I think I'll only recommend it for old computers and MSE for newer ones.

@ Six

Every bit of research I've seen into the effectiveness of anti-virus products involves the following routine - out of the millions of malware variations out there, the researcher picks a small amount and proceeds to test the security products with them. One product comes out as better than most.

Then another security researcher picks a different set of threats and tests, finding that another product comes out better than most.

I've seen it happen enough times that one security product makes short work of a threat that another security product couldn't handle, so IMO, if a security product doesn't slow down a machine much, has a good reputation in security terms, and doesn't annoy the user, it has my vote.

Security products not being able to do a scan in safe mode and the Windows Installer not working in safe mode are things that really get on my nerves, and the logic is mind-boggling.

 

[Six]

In case I wasn't clear, I see the detection rate of all major anti-virus software as good enough (except McAfee, dunno why this software keeps getting disabled). They are good enough, because once any is installed, I don't hear about the user's malware issues anymore. What makes AVG better than the rest is malware removal. It has worked for me most of the time when other AV have failed. This is all purely my personal experience.

 

[mikeymikec]

I wouldn't trust McAfee as far as I can throw it.

Two reasons:

Recently I was working on a problem where Outlook kept freezing halfway through receiving mail. The customer wanted to keep McAfee despite my advice, so I simply disabled all of its services while I troubleshooted the problem. Windows Vista's Security Centre could see that McAfee was disabled, but McAfee couldn't. As far as it was concerned, it was running fine.

I've seen McAfee using IE's rendering engine for core parts of its UI for years. Even if they have stopped doing this recently (which I doubt), it suggests to me that their developers have the mental capacity of a deranged squirrel to rely on a rendering engine that commonly is targetted by malware (I've seen McAfee's UI not work when IE wasn't working due to a malware infection, and the distinctive 'click' when navigating web pages could be heard when navigating McAfee's UI). McAfee was one of the first security products I saw that didn't work in safe mode, even for a basic scan.

I'm not putting a huge amount of stock in any security product lately as they all seem to fall victim to the scam security product's typical method of 'infection' - disabling any other app from running in normal mode until the scam security product has been terminated.

 

[JBT]

I ran Avira for years. Now I run MSE on anyones PC I work on. Avira's pop ups just became to much. I run Kaspersky Internet Security on my main box actually. I bought a 3 PC license for $10 earlier this year. It works well. It was a hog on a lower end box which has been swapped out for MSE. Both work Kaspersky is more full featured but MSE has very little overhead.

 

[mechBgon]

One of Avira's traditional strengths has been relatively good heuristic detections, if you crank the heuristics to maximum. They give you some options to work with. By comparison, MSE has a pretty simple option set.

MSE is licensed for free business use on up to 10 systems, whereas the free version of AntiVir is only for home/personal use, so that's worth noting.

From what I've seen, I wouldn't pin too much hope on either MSE or AntiVir as a primary defense. Detection is far from a certainty these days; what you want is mitigation. Assume your antivirus will NOT detect threat such-&-such... what else does your defense-in-depth strategy have that'll block it? A sandbox? Stuff's all up-to-date? EMET installed and fully configured? Non-admin account with UAC maxed out? Optionally, either Parental Controls or Software Restriction Policy restricting execution of unknown files (including exploit payloads)? AutoPlay arbitrarily disabled system-wide?

And what if all that falls through? Got a working backup/recovery strategy?