Low resource antivirus?

[Slickone]

A year or so ago, I read that Avast was light on resources, so I installed it on a couple family member's netbooks (Win7).

I noticed recently a couple people here say Avira uses fewer resources than Avast. So I'm thinking of switching out Avast for Avira on those netbooks. Should I?

I realize MSE is light, but there are more people currently saying it doesn't catch enough than there are saying it does.

 

[Virge_]

HitmanPro. You won't look back - and you won't find faster.

 

[Kaido]

MSE + Malwarebytes Live is a pretty good combination. MSE does not catch everything, but it is light, and when coupled with Malwarebytes running in realtime mode, it does a pretty nice job. Although I use both Avira & Avast on personal computers depending on the person.

 

[Slickone]

MSE + Malwarebytes Live is a pretty good combination. MSE does not catch everything, but it is light, and when coupled with Malwarebytes running in realtime mode, it does a pretty nice job. Although I use both Avira & Avast on personal computers depending on the person.

But won't the MSE/MBAM combo take more resources than Avira or Avast?

 

[Cerb]

But won't the MSE/MBAM combo take more resources than Avira or Avast?

Typically, yes, but the netbooks are your limitation. MSE eats resources by spawning many processes when there's lots of file activity. That will be reduced on lower-spec hardware like netbooks, just due to the slower CPUs, and typical use of mediocre notebook HDDs, making it mostly a self-solving problem.

MSE may not catch as much, but others will give you more false positives. I've gotten only a single alert so far, in around 5-6 years with Avast, that wasn't a false positive, and it ended up not being dangerous, anyway, due to Firefox's default download/run behavior, and not using Adobe Reader as my default PDF program (and, being up to date on Adobe Reader, it may have been harmless even if opened in that program, instead of Sumatra).

 

[John Connor]

I don't think you should run two anti-virus programs at once. They can work against each other.

 

[Deders]

Avast made quite a few old computers I've had to deal with actually usable compared to MSE

 

[Berryracer]

Nothing beats NOD32 Antivirus. Lightest AV with very good detection rates.

Try the demo and see for yourself.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I've been running AntiVir + MalwareBytes for the past couple of years. Pretty happy with it and you can't beat free.

 

[smakme7757]

Vipre is very nice. It's not free, but with the current promotion $59.95 for a lifetime license is nothing to sniff at.

I have it running on my file server with nightly scans, however i ran it on my workstation to test it first and i was happy with it.

 

[techmanc]

Avast Free Antivirus and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is all I used these last few years as well and there a great combo.