Antivirus Test: A Quest for Nearly Objective Rankings

* AV: Avira Infections found: 35,846 Comments: Took about 2 hours to plow through all the test data which ranks it as average in speed. Identified a very respectable 98.37 percent amount of malware but even this high percentage leaves 592 infections on the computer.

* AV: AhnLab Infections found: 21,301 Comments: AhnLab doesn't offer an AV-only product. This one is an integrated Internet SecuritySecurity package with "virus, work, hacking and Phishing" protection. Unfortunately, against my mix of malware this software finished third to last, and worst of all AV products that found more than 10,000 pieces of malware. Alles zu Security auf CIO.de

* AV: Avast Infections found: 36,124 Comments: Found 36,124 total malware but only after running the program twice. After the first scan produced such a small number of results, I re-ran the AV and this time it found additional infections. In truth, if I didn't have previous experience with this AV and a high respect for it, I probably would not have run the test a second time. If I had reported the first scan this software would have finished dead last instead of near the top. After two scans it did finally find 99.14 percent of infections. But, I ask, how many people will run AV software twice in a row

* AV: AVG Infections found: 110 Comments: Yeah it really only identified 110 items. I ran the test 4 different times, from the context menu and from the software's GUI, changing the options to allow more time to scan and even specifically pointing it to the folder that contains about 20K well known viruses. It still came up with only 110.

* AV: Bit Defender Infections found: 36,105 Comments: After a rocky start the software showed its true ability by finding 36,105 pieces of malware. That's a total of 99.08 percent and ranks the software in third place.