Security with Speed – Brought to you by Norton from Symantec

Testing the Home Office PC

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It’s time to put that Home Office PC to the test.  So far, I’ve assembled it from scratch, and managed to set up a RAID 1 array.  This has given me redundancy: if one drive fails, at least the other one keeps going, hopefully making my data safer.  It’s now time to install software and compare two popular anti-virus solutions:  AVG Internet Security Vs. Norton Internet Security 2009. Norton used to have a relatively bad rep as being somewhat of a bloated resource-hog nagware.  The new version of Norton however has been redesigned with speed and ease of use in mind.  So, let’s see if they did a decent job.

 

But, how should we go about this?  I decided to put the machines through a series of simple tests, and measured their performance.  I’ll do this once with AVG and once with Norton and we’ll compare.  Specifically, I wanted to look at the things Norton has allegedly improved:

-       Memory footprint

-       Download size

-       CPU usage

-       Scan time

-       Update time

-       Installation time and size

 

I wanted to perform these tests in a fairly typical office environment.  So here’s a list of the software I put on the machine before installing:

 

-       Microsoft Office

-       Firefox

-       SnagIt9 (for screen captures)

 

Then, I downloaded AVG 8.0 and started testing.

 

Download Size: 50MB

AVG’s download file was decently sized.  Anything above 100MB would have been stretching it, so this is ok.

 

Installation Time: 2:46

Two minutes and 46 seconds.  It’s almost three times as much as Norton claims their installation time to be.  But this will vary from PC to PC, depending on your system.  We’ll see how Norton stacks up.

 

 

Installation Size: 63.7 MB

Not bad.  But again, we’re doing a comparison with Norton, so more than absolute size, what matters is how this stacks up next to Norton.

 

Memory Footprint: Between 3MB and 20MB

When the system is idle and AVG is doing nothing but sitting in the tray, it uses 3MB.  As soon as you start up the application, that’s another 7MB.  If you launch the anti-virus feature and start scanning, then you get another 10MB.

 

 

CPU Usage: Between 1.3% and 25%

Again, the difference between idle and active-scanning resource usage is drastic.  When the system is idle, each AVG process takes up less than 1%.  But when the scan is launched, it averages 25%.

 

 

 Scan Time: 24:13

That’s pretty horrible if you ask me.  Almost half an hour to scan an entire system, and there’s barely anything installed on it.

 

Update Time: 47 seconds

Not bad, but not too great.  Between the time it takes to check for an update, download it, install it… almost a minute has gone by.  By no means is this a lot, but I’ve seen better.

 

So that’s it for AVG.  These results don’t mean much by themselves.  We’ll see what happens next week.

 

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