The virus can do anything from the theft of your hard disk space, to accessing your personal information and draining your CPU. There are a myriad of anti-virus applications available to shield your devices from the dangers. It is important to choose one that will have a minimal impact on performance of your system. This is a key factor that all of our antivirus programs are tested against. The results depend on how long it takes each application to complete an operation. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free, for example has a background effect of 6% when running a full scan, while ESET had an impact of 12 percent.

The German-based Avira is well-known in our tests and consistently scores above avastantivirusreview.com/doing-hack-attacks-the-right-way the 90% mark in all three categories: Protection, Performance and Usability (False Positives). Its UI is also user easy to use and comes with a variety of features, including a smart firewall and a variety of privacy tools. Avira’s subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, rather than a set 1-3 year period, which makes it simpler to cancel or alter the subscription at any time, without having to worry about second-year renewal price shocks.

A fairly new name that we’ve tested, Essentware – which was previously known as PCKeeper utilizes the Avira engine under the hood and generally scores well across the all the tests. Its performance and user interface are both easy to use, but a few stability problems which included scan jobs freezing up – have lowered the rating. However, the detection was satisfactory and a flawless run through the certification sets earned it an VB100 award.