Antiviruses on computers are very common today. In the case of Windows, we will always find Windows Defender by default, but the reality is that there are many more options on the market that are available for Windows and Mac users because computers also need an antivirus if you want to be totally safe.
However, one of the problems of antivirus is the amount of resources they need to work since they are running all the time in the background, so they take up storage and RAM, hence on computers with lower technical specifications. Antivirus programs can give us a lot of headaches.
For this reason, the people from AV-Comparatives carried out an analysis with many very popular antivirus programs on the market to find out how they affected the performance of our PC, so beyond telling us which one is the most complete or advanced, they took on the task of discovering which was the one that most affected the background performance of our computer.
What antivirus hit the performance of our PC less?
According to the source, the tests consisted of copying files, compressing and decompressing data, running, installing and uninstalling applications, downloading files and surfing the Internet, all while the various antivirus programs were running in the background.
Which generated less wear and tear in the background? according to the tests, the 5 antiviruses with the best results in the tests and that did not significantly affect the performance of the device were:
- K7 Antivirus
- Kaspersky
- McAfee
- ESET
- Bitdefender
In the case of Avast and AVG, which are two of the most popular programs in this area, antivirus was found in a middle position, that is, they affect the performance of the computer to a greater extent than Kaspersky or McAfee, but neither are they the ones that cause more stress in the background because that place is for Trend Micro and G DATA.
The researchers also mentioned that in the case of Trend Micro the performance impact was notable, as even many applications were affected in the speed of execution during tests, especially when they were run for the first time.
And what about Windows Defender?
Well, unfortunately for the most used antivirus in Windows this is not in the first places, in fact, it is within the last 3.
However, it is not all bad news, because in the tests in Microsoft antivirus it had an outstanding result in the execution of applications for the first time and in consecutive execution, in the download of files and in web browsing. The performance was not affected as much during the installation and uninstallation of applications, nor in the part of compressing and decompressing files. But where I did it much worse than most was in copying files, because here the Windows Defender analysis did decrease performance in AV Comparatives tests.
In the specific tests, we can see that the first three places were the only ones with a very good performance in all the tests, although when measuring specific numbers K7 outperformed its competitors, although that does not mean that it is the best antivirus on the market either, it’s only the one that least affects background performance.