The Real Price of Free Antivirus Software

A lot of people have the viewpoint that they shouldn’t have to pay and never will pay for antivirus, it’s a typical topic of conversation among PC bloggers and on forums. But you have heard “nothing in life is free” and this saying rings true here as well.

There are a few different free antivirus solutions such as AVG Antivirus Free Edition, Avast Home Edition and BitDefender Free Edition. These free solutions may not have any license fee or upfront cost, but in the long run they will cost you when it comes to your PC’s performance. Over the last several years AVG has been one of the leading free antivirus solutions, but how free does it actually end up being?

See the charts:

As you can see, AVG costs when speaking of PC performance. Look at it this way, you probably paid about $1,000 for your PC, printer and other peripherals. The performance cost to your PC, for using “free” antivirus, is at least 20%. So, if you do the math, your “free” antivirus ends up costing you $200.

It’s not very logical to buy a brand spanking new PC and then slow it down with security software that robs it of its performance.

I recommend at least trying VIPRE for the best pc performance. It’s only $30 for a year of AV security. Not only is it the fastest that I’ve experienced but also the most effective.

http://www.VIPREAntivirus.com

Trial Software

PC’s are like refrigerators, from time to time we need to go through the old stuff that we most likely forgot about, has expired and is taking up valuable space and toss it. Though software won’t get old, start growing bacteria and stinking, it will hog disk space and start to bog down your PC’s performance.

Often I download trial software and realize it’s not exactly what I’m looking for or I use it a couple times then it expires and I pretty much forget about it. Just the other day I downloaded a few different programs that all did basically the same thing until I found the one that worked best for me. I actually downloaded about 4 or 5 screen capture programs until I found the one that I liked the best that allowed me to capture a scrolling document. Then I had to go through the process of removing the software that I didn’t end up using. What a pain! Going through the software removal process I found about 3 additional software trials that had expired from a while back which I removed too.

To maximize your PC’s disk space it’s always a good idea to be on top of the software that’s installed and remove the programs that you are not going to use anymore, including expired trials or software demos.

My Browser’s Faster Than Yours

In an age where most of the internet users are using broadband of some sort, either through cable, phone or satellite I think it’s really hard to tell which web browsers are faster than others. If you were to strip your browser down to its core, removing all add-ons, widgets and plug-ins, would you really be able to tell which browser is faster than another?

I go back and forth between browsers. I use Safari and Opera least, I guess because they are not set as my default browser and I’m a PC man – these browsers just feel too Mac for me. I only really use them to check pages for layout/programming issues before publishing anything to the web. I was an IE user before Firefox hit the scene; of course. I was immediately drawn to Firefox because of the security features and the tabbed browsing. When Chrome was released over the summer I decided to test it out at the same time I was having serious issues with IE7 so it was an easy decision for me. I will regularly switch back and forth between IE, Firefox and Chrome but right now Chrome is set as my default browser. I will use IE when I’m on StumbleUpon because the toolbar does not work in Chrome. I use Firefox when I need to use some of the add-ons like the TinyURL Creator or the SeoQuake plug-in.

When choosing a web browser, I look for convenience factor and security, rather than speed. However, this is one of the things that every web browser seems to boast about; they all claim to be the fastest:

I decided to put Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 3.0.2, Chrome, Opera 9.6 and Safari 3.1 to a test of my own to find out which browser was faster, or if I could even notice a difference in the speed between them.

Pretty simple, I opened each browser, cleared the browsing history, cookies and temp files, I disabled all add-ons, plug-ins or toolbars and manually typed in the address bar http://www.seesmic.com. I chose Seesmic.com because it’s one of the sites I visit often that seems to take a long time to load on a regular basis because of the flash.

Test 1
Opera – 12 seconds
Chrome – 11 seconds
Firefox – 10 seconds
Safari – 10 seconds
IE – 12 Seconds

Test 2
Opera – 17 seconds
Chrome – 14 seconds
Firefox – 10 seconds
Safari – 12 seconds
IE – 11 Seconds

Test 3
Opera – 10 seconds
Chrome – 11 seconds
Firefox – 12 seconds
Safari – 13 seconds
IE – 12 Seconds

Seriously it seems like I’m splitting hairs here! Of course it’s not all the browser either, it’s my connection speed and the speed of the server the site is hosted on, programming behind site, so much goes into how fast web pages load.

I am back to my original conclusion that it’s too slight a difference to choose a browser based on speed, what do you think? Do you notice a difference in speed between browsers? What browsers do you feel are faster?