Everyone seems to favor a different antivirus software and its hard to make a choice because of this. A little test from the guys at overclockers.com might help you in your decision. They tested Desktop and Online Antivirus solutions and give recommendations at the end.
They used one virus file which is about 50 megs unzipped and contains more than 10000 virii. The software that found the most got their recommendation which is not the best criteria if you ask me. There should be other factors like system resource use (never use Norton if you want a fast system), updates, type of virii found aso. But its a good test to see how your favorite AV handles this infested files.
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unfortunately the test is probably worthless… with only 10,000 samples they’ve sampled at most about 7% of the virus population, and there’s no way to tell if that sample is representative of the whole virus population (in fact there’s little reason to believe there is such a thing as a ‘representative sample’ in this context)…
further, the documentation for the test gives no information on how the samples were validated (just because a virus scanner calls something a virus doesn’t mean it really is one)… there’s a great deal of so-called scanner fodder out there that doesn’t actually self-replicate…
many anti-virus tests are invalid on these two points alone… few people/organizations have the resources to do proper anti-virus testing, and without proper methods the results are suspect at best…
I use AVG Free, NOD32 and Avast! at home (on different PCs) and they all seem to be effective. One nice feature with Avast! is that you can do a boot-time scan, which can help catch some trojans before they get loaded into memory.
I agree with you that the results are not the non plus ultra but they probably help you in your decision which you should use and trust.
it’s difficult to use the test as a descriminator for which products you can trust and which ones you can’t when all the products had such similar scores… combined with the question of how many of the samples really were viruses, it’s impossible to tell which one really had the best score and by what margin did others really fall short…
actually we cant trust any antivirus software because viruses are getting into pc still when an antivirus software is still installed.