(eset s.p.r.o.l DAVID software progrmmer)

Always used Norton, Always will. I sooner give up some system resources for good protection than use something like AVG.

[Poor performance] + [Uses massive system resources] = [Bad anti-virus]

Avast! only failed because of 2 false positives? I don’t find that bad. I would rather have false positives than misses….

Even if that false positive is a critical operating system file that’s gets removed and then the OS won’t boot?

Accuracy matters.

Sure would be nice if they’d also test the various freeware and shareware Linux firewalls like Astaro.

They do actually test some of the Linux antivirus applications in a separate test, and I might do a write up about that.

I have to disagree with that. I think that you can look at the past results as a good indicator of how the apps will perform in the future. Look at how many times ESET has passed compared to the others. That means they have had to fix very little as a result of the tests.

That would be absolutely terrible, but I don’t think ESET will sell out like that.

I would definitely use Avast! over Symantec. You won’t see me disagreeing with that.

There is no “best” antivirus. Each one has its weakness….though some of those are inexcusable (Norton’s ridiculous scan times comes to mind).

I didn’t say it was the best…I agree with you on this one.

If you want to roll out anti-virus on a corporate level to servers and workstations, the ESET is still very good…and Avast! [in my opinion] not as robust…but on the personal use front - Avast! is free for home use and fails on 2 false positives. So what do you think I run at home?

Sure would be nice if they’d also test the various freeware and shareware Linux firewalls like Astaro.

I’ve tried out the trial for Eset’s Smart Security suite. It seems to be working pretty well but are there detection rate reviews out for it yet?

It uses NOD32 for the antivirus, so it would be the same results as NOD32. I haven’t seen any tests on the firewall yet though.

True, but it means it still needs a little work.

If an antivirus program can’t detect viruses that are already known then that is a critical flaw.

I haven’t used Avira before, but ESS was a great buy for myself. I’ve never noticed a delay with the realtime scanner though, like you have. Everything seems to be purring like a kitten.

We’ve written about that kind of test before, but it still only tells one side of the story. Antivirus applications need to catch viruses that have been released as well as ones that haven’t.

There seems to be a lot of conflicting information about the best antivirus software. A new test has reported how well different antivirus products deal with detecting new, unknown malware before it reaches the vendors’ labs.. but it tells a differnt story from VB100

http://www.sophos.com/pressoff.....-test.html

The problem with that link is that it is hosted by the developer of the “winner.” While I think that Sophos is a pretty honest company, I still don’t see how their study should be taken any more seriously than the studies found on ESET’s site or any other major dev.

http://www.sophos.com/pressoff.....-test.html

I now run ESS on 3 computers at home, and it’s pretty slick. It’s good to know it fares so well in AV tests.

Before that I had used Avira for a few years, and only dropped it because I wanted a suite that included a firewall, and Avira’s suite was giving me bluescreens (the firewall, not the AV component). The redesigned UI in ESS also won me over.

For those who still have to decide which AV to use: one thing I’ve noticed after the switch is that Avira’s real-time scanner is much, MUCH faster than ESS or NOD-32. I pretty much had to restrict the real-time scanner only to specified extensions, disable advanced heuristics and disable runtime packer scanning, otherwise I had to wait a couple of seconds for file access on regular-sized executables and documents - and I have a pretty fast, custom built system. ESS was taking something like 10 (ten) seconds to scan a 30 MB plain text (.txt) file! For some reason it scans executable files of the same size almost instantly, but it seems to have a problem with certain filetypes.

So I get a little miffed when NOD-32 is paraded as the fastest AV engine, also by ESET themselves, and would advise anyone to test for themselves.