Anti-Virus Comparative - Performance Test (Internet Security Products) – October 2014 www.av-comparatives.org
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Test methods
The tests were performed on an Acer Aspire XC600 machine with an Intel Core i5-3330 CPU (3GHz),
4GB of RAM and SATA II hard disks. The performance tests were done on a clean and fully updated
Windows 8.1 64-Bit system (English) and then with the installed Internet security software (with
default settings). The tests were done with an active Internet connection to allow for the real-world
impact of cloud services/features.
The hard disks were defragmented before starting the various tests, and care was taken to minimize
other factors that could influence the measurements and/or comparability of the systems. Optimizing
processes/fingerprinting used by the products were also considered – this means that the results rep-
resent the impact on a system which has already been operated by the user for a while. The tests were
repeated several times (with and without fingerprinting) in order to get mean values and filter out
measurement errors. After each run, the workstation was defragmented and rebooted. We simulated
various file operations that a computer user would execute: copying
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different types of clean files
from one place to another, archiving and unarchiving files, encoding and transcoding
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audio and vid-
eo files, converting DVD files to iPod format, downloading files from the Internet, launching applica-
tions, etc. We also used a third-party, industry-recognized performance testing suite (PC Mark 8 Pro-
fessional) to measure the system impact during real-world product usage. Readers are invited to eval-
uate the various products themselves, to see how they impact on their systems (due to e.g. software
conflicts and/or user preferences, as well as different system configurations that may lead to varying
results).
Security products need to load on systems at an early stage to provide security from the very begin-
ning – this load has some impact on the time needed for a system to start up. Measuring boot times
accurately is challenging. The most significant issue is to define exactly when the system is fully
started, as many operating environments may continue to perform start-up activities for some time
after the system appears responsive to the user. It is also important to consider when the protection
provided by the security solution being tested is fully active, as this could be a useful measure of
boot completion as far as the security solution is concerned. Some security products load their ser-
vices very late at boot (or even minutes later). Users may notice that some time after the system has
loaded, it will become very slow for a little while; thus, it initially looks as though the system has
loaded very quickly, but in fact the security product just loads its services belatedly, leaving the sys-
tem more vulnerable. As we find this misleading, we still do not publish boot times in our reports.
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We use around 3GB of data consisting of various file types and sizes (pictures, movies, audio files, various
MS Office documents, PDF files, applications/executables, Windows operating system files, archives, etc.).
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Converting MP3 files to WAV, MP3 to WMA and AVI to MP4
(41 Seiten)
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