Best antivirus software for your Windows PC
Keep your Windows PC safe from spyware, Trojans, malware, and more. IAN PAUL reports
Antivirus software is nearly as crucial as a PC’s operating system. Even if you’re well aware of potential threats and practice extreme caution, some threats just can’t be prevented without the extra help of an AV program – or a full antivirus suite.
You could, for example, visit a website that unintentionally displays malicious ads. Or accidentally click on a phishing email (it happens). Or get stung by a zero-day threat, where an undisclosed bug in Windows, your browser, or an installed program gives hackers entry to your system.
We’re not suggesting that PC security software is fool-proof. Antivirus software often can’t do much to stop zero-day exploits, for example. But it can detect when the undisclosed vulnerability is used to install other nasty bits, like ransomware, on your machine. Anyone who actively uses email, clicks on links, and downloads programs will benefit from an antivirus suite.
Our recommendations strike a balance between excellent protection, a worthwhile selection of features, and minimal impact on your PC’s performance.
What to look for in an antivirus suite
There are three basic requirements that an antivirus suite needs:
• High detection rate for malware and other threats
• Low impact on system resources
• An easy-to-use interface
That’s not all to consider, however. These days, many security suites come with extras such as a backup service for your most essential files, Android apps for mobile security, a more advanced firewall, family protection (read: child restriction) features, and the right to use the program on multiple PCs. Whether you need those extras depends on your personal situation.
How we test
First, we take a look at the interface to determine how easy or complicated it is. Does the interface make it easy to get at essential tools such as PC scans and password managers, for example, or is everything buried under multiple clicks? Are there elements that look like they should be clickable but aren’t? Are alerts interactive or purely informational, and does that make sense in context?
We also examine the features on offer. Every good antivirus suite should have the basics like scanning and real-time protection, but many vendors offer elements that go beyond basic security like password managers or firewalls. We try to discern whether any of these extra features are particularly useful, or just frills that look nice but don’t serve a practical purpose.
To test the suite’s demand on system resources, we run two benchmarks. The first is PCMark 8’s Work Conventional test, which simulates a variety of workloads including editing spreadsheets, browsing the web, and running video chat.
We run the benchmark before the security suite is installed. Then we install the software, have it run a full scan on our Windows 10 test machine, and start a second run of the benchmark at the same time. Then we compare the overall scores to see if the decline between the two benchmarks is significant.
As a harsher stress test, we also use Handbrake to transcode a video before and after installing the A/V. On most home PCs, this encoding task utilizes 100 percent of the CPU. We then compare transcoding times to see if there’s any significant decline.
Our test machine is an Acer Aspire E15 with an Intel Core i3-7100U, 4GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. Each security suite is tested on a clean install of Windows 10 Home. As for the antivirus suite’s detection capabilities, we’ll rely on the opinions of security researchers dedicated to this task. We’ll take into consideration reports from outlets such as A-V Comparatives, A-V Test and SE Labs.
Best overall antivirus suite
Norton Security Premium (2019)
Price: £59 from fave.co/2M3xdtg
Symantec is back with an overhauled version of Norton Security for 2019. Not a lot has changed since the last time we looked at Norton, but there are some
differences worth noting, as well as a new look at the suite’s basic performance.
For this review we’re looking at the top version of the suite, Norton Security Premium, which costs £59 per year for new users. Beyond the usual antivirus packages, Norton Security also offers packages that include Lifelock Identity Protection – Symantec acquired Lifelock in late 2016.
As I said last time, one of the first things you notice about Norton Security is that you don’t notice it. Once you install Norton, it goes about doing its job quietly. It doesn’t overload you with a bunch of pop-ups guiding you through its various features, or alerts about special offers, or anything like that. It just does its job, and lets you get on with yours with minimal interruptions.
Norton Security’s interface is more or less the same as it has been for a few years now. At the top of the window is the current status of your PC. If it’s green and says, ‘You Are Protected’ then you’re good to go. One new addition is that it now lists how many of your Norton licensed devices are in use – Premium gives you the right to install the security software on 10 devices.
Below the status area are four primary categories: Security, Online Safety, Backup, and Performance. There’s also a fifth category called More Norton with supplemental software. The status area above changes as you switch between categories giving you an overview of another aspect of your PC. When the Performance section is highlighted, for example, it shows a live count of overall CPU system usage and Norton CPU usage.
Security (pictured opposite) is where you can run security scans, update the software, see your device’s history of recent security events, and an Advanced option for adjusting your various protection options such as the enhanced firewall, intrusion protection, email protection, browser protection, and so on.
Overall, this section is straightforward and easy to understand. You can run a standard quick scan, a full system scan, a custom scan, or a custom task such as cleaning out temporary browser files, optimizing your hard disk (don’t do this to an SSD), and backing up files.
There’s also Norton’s Power Eraser, which is supposed to delete particularly stubborn threats, and Norton Insight, a feature that assesses the files on your machine to determine which ones, if any, need to be monitored more closely. You can also view a diagnostic
report that checks various issues such as whether there’s hardware that’s not working properly, whether your operating system is up to date, and whether you should review your startup programs.
Online Safety used to be called ‘Identity’, but the current name makes it clearer what this section is all about. There aren’t as many features in the newer version of Premium. The phishing protection setting is gone (phishing protection is not), but this is still the place to go to access Norton’s Password Manger, the password generator, and a quick link to Norton’s browser extensions. If you aren’t using a password manager already, you should definitely use the one included with a Premium subscription.
The Backup section is a cloud backup with 25GB included for free in your subscription. Performance includes the usual extras premium security suites offer such as a hard drive optimizer, file cleanup, startup manager, and some performance reports. These are nice to have in one package, but as we’ve noted many times before, you can find these features for free as a part of Windows or as third-party utilities.
Finally, up at the top, Norton is still rocking its report card feature which offers a summary of key security actions on your PC.
This is essentially the Norton Security Premium suite we saw last time around – same interface with some very minor additions and changes. That might be a good thing as Norton was already our top choice. Norton doesn’t have quite as many extra features as other security suites, but it does have all the more useful features we expect to see in suites like this one.
Performance
A-V Test’s September and October testing included Norton versions 22.15 and 22.16 – the latter being the version of Norton we’re reviewing here. In both September and October, Norton earned a 100 percent rating for protection against 0-day malware including both web and email threats based on more than 300 samples. For its larger malware test with more than 21,000 samples, Norton also scored 100 percent in October and November.
Moving over to AV-Comparatives and its real-world protection test, Norton blocked 99 percent of the 192 sample threats, with one false positive. For its
September 2018 Malware Protection test with nearly 12,000 samples, Norton 22.15 scored a 99.9 percent online detection rate, a 100 percent online protection rate, and a pretty abysmal 81.5 percent offline protection rate. It also had 47 false alarms.
For our performance tests, Norton improved performance slightly. The PC Mark 8 work conventional test went from 2,467 without Norton installed to 2,555 after a full system scan. Bigger is better in this test.
For our file conversion test, I used an 8GB HD MKV video file, converting it to the Android tablet preset with Handbrake. Without Norton installed, the PC finished the job in two hours and 35 minutes. After a full system scan with Norton, that time actually
went down to two hours and 26 minutes, a difference of nine minutes.
The bottom line from all of this is that you shouldn’t expect a performance hit from Norton on Windows 10, and in some cases performance may improve.
Verdict
Instead of overhauling its system with something new, Norton Security Premium stuck with what it has already built and kept its detection and protection capabilities at a high level. It’s always nice to get something flashy and new, or at least a few added features, but that’s not what you get with Norton Security Premium for 2019. Instead, you get more or less the same thing you had
last time with the same pricing. If you’re already using Norton, then there’s no reason to switch; and anyone looking for a new antivirus solution should seriously consider using Symantec’s excellent security solution.
Best budget antivirus suite
AVG Internet Security
Price: £49 from fave.co/35qy1A5
AVG has a big advantage in the free antivirus space since it owns both Avast (acquired in 2016) and its homegrown product, AVG Free. The hope is that you’ll love the free stuff so much that you’ll eventually upgrade to one of its paid products.
In the case of AVG, most people go with its Internet Security program. Priced at £49, it’s one step down
from the company’s flagship product, AVG Ultimate, and lacks a number of Ultimate’s less crucial features. For example, you don’t get AVG’s PC tune up package or third-party desktop software updater. That’s hardly a loss, though, as you can find free programs to dump cached folders taking up too much space or monitor software updates. The important security features are all included in the security suite, however, including antivirus, firewall, and phishing protection.
Unlike Avast, AVG opted not to include a password manager as part of its various security packages. Instead, you have to fork over extra to make that a part of your security set-up. That’s not a bad price, though for a few bucks more you can get an annual subscription to LastPass.
When you first open up AVG, it offers a similar aesthetic to its corporate counterpart Avast. The app largely has a grey background with bright green to highlight important information. You’ll first see a status dashboard that lets you know which AVG security features are active.
This dashboard is not intuitive, though. Almost nothing is clickable in the main part of the screen. To tweak most options, you have to click on the Menu hamburger icon at the top right of the window. There you can get into the nitty-gritty of the application’s settings, including general options, controls for ransomware protection, a data safe (encrypted folders), and a file shredder feature that overwrites deleted data to make it harder to recover.
Overall, the settings could be better organized and made clearer. Most of the key settings you’ll
want to access, for example, are under Menu > Settings > Components. From there you can tweak your firewall and play with the spam scanning settings.
Reinforcing my point about organization, however, is how the options are laid out. Each part of the component settings is hidden under a downward-facing arrow. Click that arrow and you reveal each section’s panel, but all you’ll see is an explanation of the feature and an option to uninstall individual parts of the security suite. To actually get deeper into those firewall settings, you have to click the Customize link in each tile, which is never hidden.
To access other options, like subscription information, you’ll have to go back to the main dashboard. In the upper left hand corner is an arrow – when you click on it, it opens another window where you can add another device to your subscription, as well as download and subscribe to other AVG products such as PC TuneUp, Secure VPN, and Password Protection. This window is very reminiscent of Norton Security.
AVG’s overall interface is not a deal breaker, and once you get used to the logic of the application, it’s
not hard to navigate. However, during testing I often kept thinking about its Avast counterpart, which I found to be far more intuitive with items more readily accessible and not buried under a mountain of clicks.
One thing that AVG Internet Security does make very easy is the ability to scan your PC, as the Scan Computer button is the most prominent item on the primary dashboard.
Performance
Like many of the mainstream security programs, AVG got very high marks for antivirus and malware protection. A-V Test’s August tests gave AVG 100 percent detection in its 0-day and malware tests. In A-V Comparatives’ real-world protection test, meanwhile, AVG scored 100 percent as well with three false positives out of 329 samples. When pitted against A-V Comparatives’ malware protection test, AVG scored 99.8 percent in an online scan against nearly 38,000 samples and 98.8 percent offline.
SE Labs gave AVG an AAA rating, saying that both it and Avast were the most effective free software in its tests, but AVG did fail to detect five targeted attacks. All three organizations used the free versions of AVG’s antivirus, which doesn’t have the ransomware, firewall, or phishing protection.
AVG also did well in our performance benchmarks. When we ran PCMark 8’s Work Conventional test (a simulation of everyday tasks like word processing, web browsing, and video chat), our initial score was 2,521. With AVG running in the background, that score was 2,524 – a tiny enough difference that the improvement
could be chalked up to margin of error. Our Handbrake test, which puts much more stress on a system, showed no significant performance dip. Our Windows 10 PC takes an average of one hour, 15 minutes, and 30 seconds to transcode a 3.8GB MKV file using the Android Tablet preset. With AVG installed, Handbrake transcoded the same file in one hour, 15 minutes, and 25 seconds.
Verdict
AVG leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to app design, especially compared to Avast. Given that the same company owns both development teams, we hope to see some improvement. Nevertheless, AVG
gets high marks for security, has enough features to satisfy most users, and doesn’t drag on your performance. Ian Paul
Best antivirus suite for beginners Trend Micro Maximum Security
Price: £69 from fave.co/2EofyZ2
The best antivirus solution is one that’s as simple as possible. After all, if a user can’t navigate the app to take advantage of its features, then much of the program’s usefulness is lost. Trend Micro’s Maximum Security nails this principle with some of the easiest navigation we’ve seen yet.
The default dashboard is very straightforward. There’s a large Scan circle in the middle that changes colour based on the status of the PC. Clicking on the circle initiates a quick scan, while clicking the downward-facing arrow to the right of it offers the choice of quick, full, and custom scans. Above that circle are the four basic security categories for the app: Device, Privacy,
Data, and Family.
Device tab
The Device tab includes the settings for Trend Micro’s real-time scanning and web filtering. There’s also a PC Health Checkup
option to help optimize system performance. If you use the feature, the app ranks your current optimization level and lets you choose to ‘make improvements’. These tweaks range from fixing security vulnerabilities to reclaiming disk space.
In my case, it found some saved passwords in my browser, though I can’t recall ever saving any. When I clicked on this particular finding, the program loaded the Trend Micro Password Manager – making the situation feel more like an introduction to the features of the security suite.
Next up in this section of the app is Mute Mode, which is a really nice take on the typical gaming-mode feature. You activate it from the system tray by rightclicking on the Trend Micro icon. When running, Mute Mode stops ’non-critical’ notifications from interrupting you. There are options to disable Windows Updates, automatically terminate programs, and even turn off Mute Mode after a specific interval. That’s great for gamers who, say, want to shut down their backup program, or for students who want to get serious about that history paper.
Privacy tab
The Privacy tab has features designed to keep sensitive data from leaving your PC. The Privacy Scanner option,
which works via Trend Micro’s browser add-on, automatically scans social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to optimize your privacy settings, for example. You can also scan your web browsers to make sure they are as private as possible too.
In theory, scanning social networks is a great option, especially given Facebook’s always confusing privacy settings. However, its effectiveness was hitand-miss in my experience. In Chrome and Firefox, the app produced a set of results that claimed I was offline. Later, I went back to Twitter on Chrome and Trend Micro displayed a privacy analysis summary within Twitter. Clicking through to see the scan’s results took me back to the browser add-on page that still claimed it couldn’t connect to the Internet. Thus, no security summary. A better approach would be to manage social networking protection features inside the Maximum Security desktop app – including logging in. That would offer a more reliable and centralized experience, similar to how Vipre Advanced Security handles its Social Watch feature.
When I asked Trend Micro about my troubles, the company said this issue was probably due to some browser-specific issues. “In Chrome, the feature will not work when the user is also logged in with [a]
Google account due to some possible sync issues, especially when the account is set up on multiple devices,” a Trend Micro representative told me. “[In] Firefox, the recent browser update has caused an issue and the fix should be applied [during] the next Trend Micro update in July.”
Finally, Data Theft Prevention under the Privacy tab lets you enter specific information like a credit card number, email address, or telephone number that you want protected. If Trend Micro sees this data entered into a web page, email, or instant message, it will warn you that the data is leaving your PC. Trend Micro says you don’t have to enter the entire number either. Just seven consecutive numbers is enough to monitor your credit card.
In my brief tests, Maximum Security was able to stop my credit number from going out in a Gmail message, but didn’t do a thing when I pasted my numbers into Slack and a new mail message in Thunderbird.
Trend Micro says the Data Theft Prevention feature doesn’t support the web sockets protocol, which is why Slack was able to send out the data. It should have worked in Thunderbird, according to Trend Micro. So perhaps my experience was specific to my PC.
Data tab
The Data tab is the meat of Trend Micro’s security features. Folder Shield protects specific folders against ransomware, and you can specify as many or as little folders as you’d like. Secure Erase gets rid of sensitive data, while Password Manager is a browser-based password manager for saving passwords, form filling data, and secure notes. Vault lets you encrypt sensitive data. There’s also an interesting – and perhaps controversial – feature called Cloud Storage Scanner. This feature scans Microsoft Office and PDF files stored in your cloud storage services for threats. To do this, however, the files have to be sent to Trend Micro and afterwards the company says they are securely deleted. Once the scan is done, you can get an email report letting you know the results. This feature works with OneDrive right now, while Dropbox is in beta. In my tests, the OneDrive scan failed after a few seconds.
Family tab
Finally, the Family tab lets you use Trend Micro’s parental controls for on-device limitations, such as restricting web pages or placing time limits on computer time. Trend Micro also has a settings section accessible via the settings cog next to the big Scan button on the main dashboard. Here you can adjust options for scanning and the PC Health checkup. There’s also an exceptions list to prevent Trend Micro from monitoring certain programs, and whitelisting websites and certain Wi-Fi networks.
Returning to the dashboard, next to the settings option is a button for displaying security reports that
show all threats found or blocked, results of the latest PC Health Checkup, a parental controls summary, and a security summary of your passwords.
Performance
Taking a look at
AV-Test’s March and
April 2018 results,
Trend Micro scored 100 percent on both the zero-day and web/email threats test, as well as the widespread and prevalent malware test.
AV-Comparatives had similar results. Trend Micro blocked 100 percent of 224 sample threats in the April 2018 real-world protection test with 10 false positives. Trend Micro also scored 100 percent in AV-Comparatives’ malware protection test for March 2018 with 166 false positives against more than 20,000 malware samples.
For our in-house tests, performance in PCMark
8’s Work Conventional benchmark improved ever so slightly with Trend Micro installed. Without Trend Micro installed, our test PC scored an average of 2,417 in Work Conventional; after the security app was installed, the average went up to 2,424.
In our Handbrake test, the PC chewed through a transcoding of our 3.8GB MKV file in one hour and 15 minutes. With Trend Micro installed, that time went up to one hour and 17 minutes. That’s fairly minor increase,
so you’re unlikely to notice anything except maybe under the heaviest loads on a mid-range PC.
Verdict
Trend Micro’s pricing is great and its protection is viewed as excellent by three different testing outfits. To get that level of protection, Trend Micro employs a variety of different protection layers including regular scanning, behavioural analysis, and artificial intelligence – a common theme for security suites these days. While its protection is good for standard malware threats, the data protection feature needs a little work. It ignored activity inside some well-known desktop programs, allowing me to send out purportedly protected data. The social networking privacy features could also be more reliable.
Still, the price is right for Maximum Security, and its subscriptions fall in line with what many of the other top security firms are charging. Strongly in its favour is how simple its interface is. The app itself is very easy to understand and navigate. It also didn’t bother me with a lot of notifications and updates, which is always a plus. Security suites work best when they only bother you for, you know, actual problems. Overall, Trend Micro Maximum Security is solid security software, and well-worth the money even if a few of the extra features could use some further polishing. Ian Paul