Just had to come back

[Super Trooper]

  O.k I have to admit it. I was a little fed up with Avast! home edition today after using it for a few months. It appears to be slightly more of a resource hog than other AV i've used in the past.

I tried AVG 7.0 Pro which is, at the end of the day, much less user friendly than Avast! but appears to use less resources than Avast! I thought I would give it a little test downloading trial 'fake' viruses from http://www.sidebit.com/ProjectVirusTest.php

AVG would find the real time virus no problem, but refused to recognise the fake email virus, whatever the setting. I decided this was just too risky and reinstalled Avast! which finds the fake email virus no problem and also the real time virus (but only when Standard Shield is set to high, why is this?).

I think i'll stick with Avast! because at the end of the day, setup and configuration is a doddle, Avast! has the best help forums and it is obviously one of the smartest scanners around. I can live with the slightly higher use of resources. (any plans to try to sort this in future updates?)

 

[Culpeper]

A lot of people have the same resource complaint with Avast.  Glad to see you did a comparison with AVG and posted the results.   Resource usage is sort of a double edge sword.  On one edge we want low resource usage for the best possible protection on the other edge.  Protection being the key word here.  I think the heavy resource usage is just on start up where Avast is concerned.  Neverthless, the so-called extra resources is the opportunity cost for peace-of-mind knowing you have adequate attack protection from the bad guys.  When fighting the bad guys you want to protect yourself with extreme prejudice.  I think Avast more than offers that for the user through the program itself, the staff, and peer support, just to mention a few.

[CharleyO]

I have to agree with Culpeper. Great protection & help is much more important than a few resource numbers. Besides, McAfee (which I just dumped for Avast) and Norton use up way more resources.