Avast - ?excessive demand on resources

[merf]

I currently have a Dell with McAfee antivirus pre-installed (3 month trial).
I actually like the McAfee program, but I find their products way overpriced.
I am considering going with Avast (Home) antivirus - which looks great from the reviews - the only critiscism being that it uses a lot of CPU resources and
slows down your system.
Does anyone know or have experience as to how Avast's demand on resources compares with Mcafee?
Because I hardly notice Mcafee's presence.
If Avast's demand on resources is equal or less than McAfee, then the choice of Avast for me is a no-brainer.

[lee16]

Avast has a very very low resource demand, exspecialy compared to McAfee and Nortan, i have a 450 MHZ CPU and 256 ram and avast set to high and i don't notice a thing.
Before this i used a 200 MHZ CPU and 128 RAM and i still didn't notice a difference when avast was turned to high.

So i would say that you are fine with the resource usage from avast!

EDIT: Sorry nearly forgot to Welcome you.

Welcome to the Avast forums merf


--Lee

[bob3160]

merf
Just a word of advice. Before you install Avast!, make sure that you completly remove McAfee. It's not advisable to have two resident AV programs on your system.

[Lisandro]

The only critiscism being that it uses a lot of CPU resources and slows down your system. Does anyone know or have experience as to how Avast's demand on resources compares with Mcafee?

Well, I used McAfee in the past and cannot compare 'actual' versions of both of them.
In the past, the use of memory and resources were:
Norton > McAfee > avast

Anyway, avast is so configurable that you can let it the way you want/need  

[inthewildteam]

merf,

settings for standard shield set to high, on XP Pro with all providers running except Outlook (I don't use it) less than 25 meg of memory and 1% cpu.  Firefox (my browser is using more)

[CharleyO]

*

Welcome to the forums, merf !    

I'm curious to where you heard/read that avast ... uses a lot of CPU resources and slows down your system?      

As you can tell from the above posts, neither is true!      

*

[merf]

If you search "Avast" on google groups, use of resources is really the only critiicism people make of the product.
Norton Anti-Virus appears to use the most resources of all anti-virus products - and this is also the consistent criticism I found with Norton.
McAfee appears to fall somewhere in the middle, but as I said, I really don't notice its presence.
So if Avast is like Mcafee (or better), and I suspect it may well be based on the above responses, then Avast is for me.