Which antivirus programs delay your computer

A new study conducted on May 9, 2018, by AV-Comparatives, ranked the most widely used antivirus programs on the market in terms of time to delay the performance of your system, for computers running Windows 10.

The test was performed on a Lenovo G50 powered by an Intel Core i3 chip, 4GB of RAM and a hard drive. The operating system was Windows 10, with the Fall Creators Update version and all the applications were installed with their default settings.
AV-Comparatives has performed a number of tasks, including copying files, archiving and removing files, installing and removing applications, launching programs, downloading files, browsing web pages, and PCMark 10 application as reference.

The worst performance was recorded during the Microsoft Windows Defender test, which comes pre-installed on Windows 10. Windows Defender caused a significant drop in performance when copying files and installing applications, with the smallest drop occurring while downloading files . Microsoft's security solution scored 96,7 points on the PCMark 10, which is not as good as Avira's 99,4 points, but not as bad as Quick Heal's 95,2 points.

Overall, Windows Defender solemnly finished in last place, while K7, ESET, Avast, AVG, Bitdefender and Kaspersky received the best results.

According to the research, the majority of antivirus solutions had little effect on website browsing performance or file copy, but the greatest slowdown was recorded when launching applications for the first time. Products from Tencent, Trend Micro, Emsisoft and VIPRE slow down systems when launching new applications for the first time.

In a related note, AV-Comparatives states that "although we report the results for the first opening of an application as well as for the subsequent openings, we consider the next openings more important, since this function is done several times by the users".

Keep in mind that this research was conducted with a low-end device, so the impact on performance may be significantly smaller in the case of a computer with newer hardware and SSDs.