Once again Kaspersky Anti-Virus earns our Editors' Choice as the best standalone antivirus application we reviewed this year. But, as the performance charts below show, the competition is knocking at the door. In particular, we call out BitDefender Antivirus for making the most gains over the previous year. And while we think Norton Antivirus 2008 offers comparable
antivirus protection, it weighs in at 300MB, six times the file size of either Kaspersky or BitDefender on your hard drive. Again, Trend Micro and McAfee hold their own this year, neither rising nor falling with respect to the competition. CA continues to struggle with its place in the consumer market, and Panda pulls up the rear.
To find out how we test antivirus software, see CNET Labs'
How we test: Antivirus software page. To see how a given antivirus app performs when stopping malicious code, we recommend viewing the latest test results published by independent antivirus testing organizations
AV-comparatives and
Checkvir.com.
iTunes 7 deep-scanning performanceIn seconds (shorter bars indicate faster performance)
Microsoft Office peformanceIn seconds (shorter bars indicate faster performance)
8.0 out of 10
7.8 out of 10
6.8 out of 10
5.0 out of 10
