AVG vs NOD32

[captpackrat]

AVG anti-virus has been increasingly pissing me off lately.  I'd already had to disable two components, the Link Scanner and Web Shield because they slow down web browsing dramatically, but recently the Firewall component has been causing problems, culminating last night in a total inability to access the Internet, and to make matters worse, when I tried to disable the firewall, the application froze up.

I'd had it, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.  Even though I had a paid version of AVG (and about a year and a half left on it!), I uninstalled it.  (And the uninstaller failed the first time through.)  Version 7.5 was pretty good, but 8.0 is just unusable.

Since I'm not running 2000 Server anymore, I decided to go back to Eset NOD32, and I'm amazed at the difference.  When I had AVG installed, the CPU meter in the Vista Sidebar kept spiking to 50-75% all the time.  I'd assumed that was just Vista being a processor hog, even though I've got a fairly beefy quad-core CPU.  But now that I'm running NOD32, the CPU meter is running about 1-3% most of the time.  I'm not sure whether that means AVG is that bad or NOD32 is that good, or both.

I'm rather annoyed that I paid good money for AVG and it's unusable.

Comments

[dellway.livejournal.com]

I hear Avira have put out a free personal AV lately. Judging by how well the premium level product performed, it's probably worth a look too.

[okageryuu.livejournal.com]

Pretty much EVERYONE on SomethingAwful's forums (the only forum I really like) recommends NOD32. I wCOish I had enough to get it. x_x AVG really can be a CPU hog...

Actually, when you install AVG, you can choose to not install the link scanner or e-mail scanner.

[okageryuu.livejournal.com]

Actually, thanks to this, I think I'm going to save up for a year or so of NOD32. Did you get the Security Suite?

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I just bought the standard version. I don't need antispam (Outlook 2007's spam filter is adequate) and I don't need another firewall (Vista's built-in firewall is adequate, plus I have a NAT firewall)

[okageryuu.livejournal.com]

Ok, cool. How many years did you get it for? I use Vista's firewall too (plus my NAT). I also have Windows Defender, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Ad-Aware for spam, spyware, blah blah blah.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Two years. I'd been using NOD32 for years on my server, until they dropped the ability to buy just a single business user license. That's the only reason I'd ever switched to AVG and paid for a full license.

[okageryuu.livejournal.com]

Ahh. Yea, I can understand that. I usually use AVG Free 8.0. It's been okay so far.

A LOT better than the other free security programs I've used...like Online-Armor or COMODO. Both of those programs either locked up my shut down sequence (OA) or slowed it down from 30 seconds to approximately 1m30s (COMODO). =/

[deffox]

I find it's tolerable with disabling Safesurf and Safesearch. I also remove cookie scanning as you mentioned before. But I do agree that it is nowhere near as good as 7.5 even after tweaking. Making it hard to remove unwanted features is not endearing either.

NOD32 is a new name to me. Hope it works well for you.

At the moment I'm trying to stick to the freeware side of things. So I'm stuck with the line that beggars can't be choosers. If I had just one computer I'd get whatever works best, but I'm stuck maintaining family machines and don't want to get ten licenses.