The German antivirus test lab AV-Test has tested a large number of consumer virus scanners for Windows 7 in March and April. The result concludes that paid antivirus products are top performers and worth their money. The lab took a look at several components of the antivirus products, the winners were Bitdefender and Kaspersky Lab which both achieved a perfect score.
The tests excluded virus scanners of the Chinese antivirus companies Qihoo and Tencent, because according to several testlabs both vendors committed fraud in earlier tests.
The antivirus software was tested for detection of malware, performance and false positives. The latter means that the virusscanner marks clean software as malware which can cause serious harm when that happens to e.g. system files. For each test the scanners could score 6 points.
Bitdefender and Kaspersky Lab were the only scanners that scored the maximum of 18 points. When it comes to malware detection most antivirus scanners achieved well with an average detection rate of 96-97%. Only Microsoft Security Essentials performed bad and scored only 0.5 points on the malware detection tests.
When it comes to false positives AhnLab, Comodo, F-Secure, K7 Computing, Panda Security, Quick Heal, ThreatTrack and Trend Micro were wrong several times. Despite the bad malware detection score Security Essentials didn't end on the last place. The virusscanner scores high when it comes to system performance and false positives and eventually scored 11.5 points. Which is more than ThreatTrack that, with a score of only 10 points, was last.
On the 12nd place is the first free antivirus product, which is the virus scanner from Avast. Although the Avast scanner is the best free antivirus scanner it's outperformed by many paid scanners.
