If you count both major players and smaller companies, you'll find dozens of antivirus products available. Which one should you choose to protect your own PCs? If you were choosing between different cars, you could take test drives, see how each suits your needs. But you wouldn't want to test drive an antivirus using live malware! Fortunately, independent labs like AV-Test Institute do the necessary research for you. The latest report from this lab helps identify the best antivirus products.

Protection Testing

The prime responsibility of any antivirus is to keep malware from infesting your computer. AV-Test's researchers challenge each tested product to defend against two sets of malware samples. One set includes only the very newest variants, what people call zero-day threats. The other samples are chosen because they've been widespread and prevalent during the four weeks preceding the test.

Each product can earn up to 6 points for malware protection, and three of the two dozen involved in this test managed a perfect 6, Trend Micro, Avira, and F-Secure. Another eight managed 5.5 points. That's still good, but for Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender it was a letdown, as they both managed 6 points in the previous test.

This test includes Microsoft's built-in antivirus as a baseline, separate from the actual test set. Good thing; Microsoft earned zero points for protection. ThreatTrack's Vipre also came in low, with 2.5 points. And Comodo dropped from 6 points in the previous test to 4 points this time.

Performance Variation

If your antivirus puts a strain on system performance, if it interferes with your use of the computer, you're likely to turn it off, either temporarily or permanently. AV-Test also rates each antivirus's effect on system performance, and the scores ranged from 2.5 to the maximum of 6 points in this test. Nine of the two dozen products scored 3.5 or lower.

Bitdefender and Kaspersky earned the full 6 points; this is typical for both. Among the products scoring 3.5 or worse were Vipre, Norman Antivirus 11, and AhnLab.

False Positives

Like the fabled boy who cried "Wolf," an antivirus that wrongly reports valid programs as malicious will come to be ignored. AV-Test's researchers check each product against hundreds of legitimate websites and thousands of legitimate programs, noting any false positive reports. They also note whether each antivirus erroneously warns about activities performed by valid programs, or even blocks such activities.

AV-Test's press release reported that "several programs had significant problems with false positives." The most egregious example was Chinese antivirus Tencent, which flagged 134 valid programs as malicious. Even so, the worst score in this test was 4 points, shared by Tencent and AhnLab. Twenty of the two dozen products earned 5.5 or 6 points.

The Usual Winners

Kaspersky and Bitdefender came out on top, as usual, though they missed a perfect score by one half-point. Trend Micro did equally well. Avira and Qihoo took 17 of 18 possible points. All earned kudos from the AV-Test staff.

AV-Test's researchers work diligently to help us understand which antivirus products are most effective, as do the teams at AV-Comparatives and Dennis Technology Labs. The results from these and other independent labs go a long way toward pinpointing just which antivirus products are the most effective.

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