#1. Years of promotion/brainwash have been successful to make people think AVs are something mandatrory and unavoidable. Good job the vendors did here. #2. Unfortunately in addition to hog resources most AVs tend by design to break several other security mechanics, i.e. https by using their nasty link checkers. #3. Points above can lead to the impression of being safe, which is dangerous cause there's absolutely no safety if you forget using your brain. Security for me starts with a nicely fortified browser which is able to block malicious intrusion from websites (although it became seldom these days). I can remember members of a german forums being infected by a highjacked add banner, without any chance for their AVs to react, where a simple add-blocker prevented the infection. Disabling auto start for removable drives (not sure why this is enabled by default anyways) so far proved as sufficient to block infections. Always nice to have my usb pen arrested at friends machines since the stupid AV detects an autorun INF from the Windows Setup on that usb. Using myself Win Defender restricted to the systemdrive, all other drives are excluded and scanned by demand. Adiitionally the removable drive scanning is disabled, since i know my drives and can scan others if needed. Only in case of suspicious behavior i scan the system with Malwarebytes or an Online scanner. Regular image backups complete the package.
Performance impact is very relative ... especially if Defender is only protecting the system drive. All AVs tend to be braking performance in case they scan all the time in the background and try to verify every file that the user is looking at or just has downloaded.
To anyone using Avira, are you having issues with the latest update? Scheduler service and realtime protection are not starting. I've been having this issue on W10 LTSB 1607, Defender removed. Cheers.
I haven't had any issues with Avira lately, other than it can briefly freeze my system during definition updates. I have noticed that avira.systraystarttrigger.exe must be set to autostart in addition to avgnt.exe in order for the tray icon to appear and work properly, but I have not had issues with the scheduler or RT protection specifically. Avira 15.0.25.154 W10 Pro 1607 As a starting point, you might want to use their utility to perform an uninstall - I can't post a link so just Google Avira RegistryCleaner. I found it on their manual uninstall instructions page. You also will want to take a look at your startup entires with Autoruns. For reference, these are the files that Avira needs for autostart: c:\program files (x86)\avira\antivirus\avgnt.exe c:\program files (x86)\avira\launcher\avira.systraystarttrigger.exe c:\program files (x86)\avira\antivirus\sched.exe c:\program files (x86)\avira\antivirus\avguard.exe c:\program files (x86)\avira\launcher\avira.servicehost.exe
Thanks Korvar, so it must be something on my end. One last question: Do you have Defender disabled, removed or just left it like it was? Cheers.
I do have Windows Defender disabled, but not removed. I also run Malwarebytes with Avira, and they've played well together. I'd suggest using the Avira uninstall utility though - it helps clean up the registry leftovers better than the default uninstall. It's like using Display Driver Uninstaller vs the uninstallers that come with video drivers - a night and day difference that helps clear up lots of 'loose ends' which would be next to impossible to track down otherwise.
I tested them all back in 2007/8, Vipre was my favorite at that time, but due to license issues I switched to ESET NOD32 (v.3) and have been using ESET since then, no regrets.
Used Kaspersky Internet Security (2017 and earlier) for a while, did a very nice job, was the best to me, but I got rid of it because I found that it used too much ressources (for nothing), and it was the same for other antivirus softwares, so I decided to stick with Windows Built-In antivirus, Windows Defender, which does a nice job (not better than other antivirus), but it doesn't slow down the PC. I believe that the problem is the guy in front of the computer, if he didn't properly configure his firewall and/or goes berserk and visits doubtful websites and runs unknown programs.
Impact depends on users settings. Defender only defends the system partition for me, all others are excluded, so the impact is marginal.
That AV chart is a joke. Honestly, it makes me think that they want reach the such results, to make it look that there is a big performance gap, even that's not really true ....
@Jari good find dude thanks for share useful info; still I think is more useful for paranoic users also