View from the Labs

This year’s antivirus roundup has shown Darien that the industry is maturing and breaking away from annual branding cycles – and made him think twice about Defender Antivirus

Looking back at last year’s antivirus roundup, what’s most striking is how little has changed in 12 months. It may be no coincidence that the industry as a whole seems to be backing away from the traditional annual branding: it’s a bit hard to drum up excitement for the latest and greatest security suite when it’s plainly the exact same program as last year, perhaps with an antiransomware module baked in for good measure.

That’s no bad thing, of course. It’s a sign that the industry’s maturing. Another sign is the way third-party firewalls have been falling out of favour in recent years. Too often in the past, software publishers have stuffed their offerings with unneeded features and utilities that just get in the user’s way – or, even worse, encourage the idea that online security has to be complicated and expensive. As you will have seen on the preceding pages, that approach hasn’t wholly died out, but we are finally moving in the right direction – towards both smarter and leaner security software.

On the subject of leanness, I have to admit, I’ve never really had much truck with grumblings about security software slowing your PC down. Yes, I remember how things used to be in the bad old days, but how much of that was really the software’s fault? I’m talking about a time when a single-core 233MHz processor and 64MB of RAM was considered state of the art. Throw in a 5,400rpm hard disk – connected, perhaps, via a 33MB/sec IDE connector – and it’s hardly surprising that a security scan would cause things to grind to a halt.

Those days are long gone. I can’t remember the last time I noticed security software having any impact on performance. That’s not to say that suites haven’t annoyed me with pop-ups and clunky interfaces that take forever to open. But things haven’t seemed to run slower.

Now, though, the performance data from AV-Comparatives has got me thinking about why that might be. You see, ever since the first release of Security Essentials, I’ve been running Microsoft’s betterthan-nothing antivirus client on any PC that doesn’t have anything more sophisticated installed. Since it’s built into Windows 8 and 10, I rather doubt I’m alone in that.

Now, AV-Comparatives has revealed that Defender Antivirus slows down your computer more than any other security software. So it’s no surprise that whenever I’ve installed some other suite, it hasn’t seemed slow – not when it’s replacing the biggest resource hog in the business.

This realisation doesn’t change a lot. Even if Defender Antivirus were the slickest, fastest antivirus client on the planet, we’d still recommend something else, because it’s simply not great at catching malware. But it’s an ironic turnaround. Once it was a fact of life that installing security software would slow down your PC. Today, doing so will actually make it run faster.

“Once it was a fact of life that installing security software would slow down your PC. Today, it will make it run faster”