Anyone that has had experience with Avast versions 4 and 5 care to comment on whether version 5 has improved on system performance? Since 4.8 is included in the test, it would give a (very) rough idea where 5 would have fallen on some of these graphs.
IMO Avast 5's GUI is much faster. Can you say lightning fast. Its the fastest AV/IS GUI I have ever seen. Manual scanning speed is too close to call by eyeball. As far as system performance goes Avast 5 is heavier than 4 but not a great deal heavier. Boot times are slightly slower but again nothing major. Considering Avast 5 should have much better protection the small performance penalty is fine by me. Many people claim Avast 5 uses less memory than 4. That may be true but unless the PC Avast is installed on has a lack of free memory less ram usage will not improve performance.
I have Avast 5 Free installed on my 3 PC's. A 1.4 Ghz Centrino laptop with 768 megs of ram running XP Pro sp3 32 bit, A Athlon II 240 2.8 Ghz with 4 gigs of ram running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and a Q6600 @ 3 Ghz with 8 Gigs of ram running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. The first and last were migrated from Avast Home 4.8 to Avast 5 Free. On both systems I could see a slight performance penalty when moving from Avast 4.8 Home to Avast 5 Free. All three PC's run trouble free and perform as they should IMHO. How much of an increased performance hit Avast 5 pro and AIS will bring I have no idea as I have never used them. I was seriously considering purchasing Avast 5 Pro for my three PC's but the licenses are per PC not for 3 PC's as AIS is. This makes pro more expensive than AIS if you have more than 1 PC. I guess I could buy AIS and not install the firewall.
Other thoughts: I used Avast 4.8 Home because I was sick of pig AV products. I was a long time Trend Micro Antivirus user because it was not a pig. This was about 2001. I switch to their IS product when it came out (2005?)and I was very happy with both the performance and protection. Each year TIS got to be more and more of a hog. It became as bad or worse than Norton and Mcafee. Place your favorite hogs name here. I gave up on Trend Micro in 2008 and went looking for a product that had decent protection and was not a total pig.
I tried Avira and it killed hard drive performance so bad a floppy drive looked fast. I found that many people used AVG free so I gave it a shot and it was not a pig so I used it for close to two years. AVG at some point started having update problems and after months of this problem I found and switched to Avast 4 Home. I could not believe how light Avast 4 Home was. It was like not even installing an AV as far as I could tell. The downside was the horrid media player GUI and the sounds. Once I found that skins and sounds could be turned off I was 100% happy. Now we have Avast 5 its not perfect plus 64 bit support is not complete. No boot scan, no behavior shield etc. ALWIL claims its coming, lets hope so. For me Avast 5 Free is light enough and has better protection than 4.8 Home. It should have better protection than most paid products out there. Avast 5 is a keeper IMHO!
Looks like Symantec really did some good work getting the performance hit reduced in the 2010 versions. Did they finally figure out how to make a uninstaller? I'm not sticking my neck out to find out that's for sure.
