Keep using avast or pay for better?

I have been using Avast for the last couple years and it has worked well even though it did allow one virus in but that was my fault.

The only problem I have is I think it really hogs my system down and if I could find another antivirus that uses lower resources and was as good I would be will be willing to pay for it, any reccomendations or do you think I should stick with avast?

BTW I have tried AVG, and Avira and dont really care for either and I require email protection since I get around 75-100 + emails daily for buisness.

 

Well in a sense Avira free does scan email messages, but it does it in a round-about way.

Anyway, NOD32 is a great paid-for anti-virus and should both be a step up from Avast and meet your needs.

 

you sure VRDB isn't bogging you down? right click and disable it.

 

The first thing I always do after installing Avast is to disable VRDB.

 

well i don't know what else there is. you could do the above mentioned, but any quality antivirus is gonna give a performance hit. i'd rather take a performance hit, rather than troubleshooting a virus or doing clean format and reinstalling everything because my computer lost a 1-2% speed.

 

Avast always gets a knock for performance - have you actually tried something else yet to see if your performance improves? I have Avira Premium right now on a 90-day trial after running Avast for over a year. It is about 8-10mb less on resources, but I can't really "see" a difference.

Both NOD and KIS offer 30 day trials so before you buy (these would be the only two I would consider if I was buying). I also "think" I need email protection, but my Exchange host provides me with protection on their servers. I am probably going to stick with Avira Free after my premium license expires.

 

In my experience most programs you pay for aren't significantly better with resource consumption. If you are happy with the protection you are currently seeing, I would deal with the performance knock and use that money toward your next (more powerful) laptop... Of course if you have a Core 2 Duo I'm surprised it is using such a significant amount of the performance you have...

Let me ask you... Is the performance knock you are seeing affecting your use of the computer or are you simply concerned about the high numbers in your task manager?

 

Double clic the avast tray icon and change some options in the modules. For example, It scans every program on your system every time you open it, so you can disable that feature. You can also turn off some modules that you don't need, like P2P scanning, IM scanning and so on... I'm not in my home computer to explain more, but hope you get the idea.