As AVG has turned into a bloated mess I'm replacing my AV for first time in 5 years!!!! So its between Avast or Antivir, low resource usage being a priority as I rarely get caught with anything.

Opinions?

And yes I've read the other posts on this and I'm leaning towards Antivir at the mo but would appreciate comments re resource usage (and false positives as I've seen Avast seems to suffer more with that)

As far as resource usage there is no comparison. Avira is much lower than Avast. Avira uses 3 process totaling 10MB on my machine. Avast has 5 processes (you can shut some of them off though) and uses any where from 30- 50 MB of RAM. Both are much better than AVG 8 and neither is as good as AVG 7.5 as far as resource usage goes.

If you want low resource usage go for Avira. I find it much lighter.

JD, avira free is light and I find it no problem.

I'm sure others will say different

Does Antivir include automatic definition updates, or are they manual?

Both. You can schedule your updates when ever you want or do them manually. You can also set them to be done silently in the background, minimized, or full screen when they are done automatically on a schedule.

Scans are very quick.

Thanks for update clarification, Anthony.

I guess the fact that Antivir has no e-mail scanner isn't too much of a problem if you're using an online e-mail service such as gmail or yahoo mail -- right?

One other thing . . . how is Antivir's detection rate and cleanup of any problems compared with AVG 7.5? I'm still using AVG (commercial) with some time yet before the expiration -- so, I'm just curious and trying to think ahead a little.

I haven't had any infections to clean up so I can't comment on that. Avira's detection rates are rated higher than both Avast and AVG from what I have read.

As for the e-mail scanner or lack of one I use Gmail so I don't need one but if I used regular mail I still wouldn't use it because I know enough not to open bad e-mails and if I did the resident guard would take care of it so I would still be protected.

Obviously common sense should be used with e-mails.

However, there are times when a brain cramp arrives or another household member is using the computer and opens an infected e-mail.

How important is it to have an e-mail scanner? AVAST has it but AntiVir does not.

Some helpful advice from a knowledgable person would be appreciated.

Well if you have a "brain cramp" or a household member opens an infected email and you don't have an email scanner your AV app will have a resident guard as I said earlier and it will treat that infected e-mail like any other infection so you aren't unprotected. The e-mail scanner is just an extra level of protection that is redundant IMO and not a necessity. In some cases it causes more problem than it's worth like quarantining or deleting your whole in box on you.

Here's your AV test. http://www.av-comparatives.org/ Look at line items 17 and 18.

While it tests the Premium version of Antivir, the scan engine is the same for the Free version.

I actually kind of like the new AVG. However if I was going to choose a free one besides it, I would probably choose antivir.

I too liked AVG, and used it for many years. After reading in this thread about how much lighter-weight AntiVir is, I gave it a shot. I've been very impressed with it so far. It uses much less memory!

still using AVG till this day guys. i have no problems with it. yes, AVG is using 61MB or so but eh... i have 1GB of RAM. does this matter in terms of what i do on a computer? uh... no but for some YES. Cheers

Thanks for the replies, looks like I was right in my leaning towards Antivir so will be installing it as soon as necessary (which it seemingly isn't yet - just had my AVG 7.5 successfully update despite all updates supposedly stopping on the 25th June, wonder if it the deadline has been extended again)

Ignore that pop up. The official date that AVG will stop supporting AVG 7.5 is December 31, 2008.

This is the official date from the sticky thread on the AVG forums. http://freeforum.avg.com/read.php?1,123812,backpage=,sv=