Microsoft Security Essentials Scores Incredibly Well in New Antivirus

It's AV's job to meddle into everything or most anything going on in the system. That has to have some impact, more protection, more impact, it's unavoidable. Fortunately or by design it's not measured by percentage of CPU, RAM or disk usage but have set values in any system. Take one AV, turn off all but one core of the CPU and slowdown will be quite noticeable comparing to when let's say all four cores are running. So you can't compare impact of one AV on computers that vary a lot by their performance.
Benchmarks I found are mostly HW centered so they are not much influenced by AV's presence. Monitoring let's say disk performance in real time with or without AV will tell you more.

sygnus21 said:

Let's put this in perspective (and reality) - In electronics timing like say the stroke of a key and it's action showing up on a screen... this is a huge difference; In terms of just sitting in front of a PC and waiting for something to happen... like your PC starting up, or a program opening... you're very likely not going to notice that difference.

That depends on a few things, but two worth bringing up:

1) Are you someone who will open & close a lot of programs/windows while using PC
2) Have you had a chance to use a really fast PC with no AV and a ton of other programs installed?

If answer to both is yes, then you will definitely notice the difference. Of course, if you've had a 3rd party AV for years and got used to same slowness on start-up and while it's searching your PC, then you probably just think it's normal for things to work that way.

There really is no reason to use anything other than MSE if you know a few things how stuff works on the internet. I've worked in an IT company and repaired computers on daily basis and the reason people had a ton of malware and stuff like that was because they would click anything and everything, download various stuff from unknown websites and emails as well.

But at the end of the day, each user uses their machine as they want. If someone has one, two or even more 3rd party AV/anti-malware and similar programs installed and they're fine with stuff being slower than it could be, then that's up to them.

Clam said:

That depends on a few things, but two worth bringing up:

1) Are you someone who will open & close a lot of programs/windows while using PC
2) Have you had a chance to use a really fast PC with no AV and a ton of other programs installed?

If answer to both is yes, then you will definitely notice the difference. Of course, if you've had a 3rd party AV for years and got used to same slowness on start-up and while it's searching your PC, then you probably just think it's normal for things to work that way.

There really is no reason to use anything other than MSE if you know a few things how stuff works on the internet. I've worked in an IT company and repaired computers on daily basis and the reason people had a ton of malware and stuff like that was because they would click anything and everything, download various stuff from unknown websites and emails as well.

But at the end of the day, each user uses their machine as they want. If someone has one, two or even more 3rd party AV/anti-malware and similar programs installed and they're fine with stuff being slower than it could be, then that's up to them.

1) - To answer the larger question, and clear the assumptions, this no rookie here. That said, yes... I've run my machine with and without AV, and yes, there is a slight difference; However, it's not so much that I'm sitting around whining about how slow my system is with an AV installed.

2) - We've all had IT jobs and have opinions and thoughts on how things work and should be. Nothing new here.

3) - Arguing about fractions of a second an AV program "may" add is a waste of time, especially when it'll hardly be noticed by those doing daily tasks on their PC's. I know I'm not sitting here sayin "man, my PC could be so much faster if I didn't have that AV installed". Why... because the only time you may really notice it is during start-up and shut-down, and that's not a major daily task of using a computer. In short, it's insignificant.

4) - Yes, we run our systems as we see fit... even if others disagree.

Bottom line is I think this argument is much to do about nothing.

Peace

Yes, I can run computer without any protection too but time i have to spend by being extra careful is far longer than eventual slowdown caused by adequate protection. Only some common sense plus some protection without great impact on performance and undue risks. For me and like me with a lot of experience that should be enough but to tell somebody just starting or without any knowledge or not caring to go on internet, swap files etc. I would never recommend any less than what I use but also much stronger protection and even that in many cases is not enough. Even for the price of slowdown it's better in such cases to be as protected as possible than to loose everything. People that don't know much about safety, usually lack the knowledge to do proper backups and to get out of eventual tight spots.