By Performance Drag Reduced
Five or six years ago security suites rightfully earned a reputation as bloated performance hogs. Consumers complained and vendors listened. Performance impact from almost all modern suites is way down.
In my performance tests Ad-Aware had the most noticeable impact, especially on boot time. F-Secure and PC Tools had the least effect on boot time. Kaspersky had no measurable effect on the time required for my file move/copy test and Webroot almost as little effect. Kaspersky also didn’t slow the zip/unzip test at all.
The hands-down winner for minimal effect on system performance is Astaro Security Gateway Version 8 Home Edition, because it runs on its own dedicated PC. For a normal suite that actual runs on your PC TrustPort had the lightest touch, with all drag scores below ten percent. Kaspersky also did well, with no measureable impact on two of the tests.
Spam Filtering, If You Care
It’s hard to get excited about spam filtering. Many e-mail accounts come pre-filtered, and the free Cloudmark DesktopOne beats all the suites in accuracy and breadth of support. Perhaps that’s why the antispam components in these suites fail to impress. Astaro does offer one unique feature; it can quarantine spam on its own dedicated PC, so nothing hits your Inbox but valid mail.
Most filter POP3 e-mail regardless of which e-mail client you use. Webroot and Trend Micro work only with supported e-mail clients, which lets them offer more features. Like Cloudmark, quite a few of the suites correctly blocked no valid personal messages or valid bulk messages in testing, but they missed between 8 and 58 percent of spam (Cloudmark missed just 2.4 percent). There isn’t a clear winning suite in this area; McAfee, AVG and BitDefender Total Security 2011 all did a good job.
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Phishing Protection and Privacy
Phishing web sites don’t attack using malicious code. Instead they trick their victims into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. All of the suites attempt to identify phishing sites and guide you away from them so you won’t risk being fooled. Norton is consistently the best at phishing detection, though BitDefender beat it in testing this time around and Ad-Aware came close. ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware and McAfee were just a few points behind Norton. As for the rest, none detected as many fraudulent sites as Internet Explorer’s built-in SmartScreen Filter alone.
Other privacy offerings vary. AVG will help you recover from ID theft. BitDefender, Kaspersky, Outpost, Panda and Trend Micro include a feature that prevents accidental transmission of user-defined private data. Panda and Kaspersky let users enter passwords using a virtual keyboard, to foil keyloggers. Norton’s password management matches all but the very best standalone products. Webroot’s password management actually is the best, as it’s a licensed edition of PCMag Editors’ Choice LastPass 1.5. For privacy protection Norton and Webroot are tops.
Parental Control Zeroes and Heroes
For some suite vendors parental control is clearly a “checkbox feature”. They hope to get credit for including it but won’t spend much effort to make it shine. I’d prefer that they simply omit the feature as BullGuard, Outpost and Webroot do rather than offer a poor implementation. For example, the limited parental control system in eScan Internet Security Suite 11 isn’t even browser-independent.
F-Secure’s rudimentary parental control offers no per-user settings. Along with Ad-Aware, Panda and Trend Micro it succumbed to my hack attack tests. TrustPort blocks access to inappropriate web sites but clearly missed some porn sites, and configuring per-user settings is an experts-only task. On the other end of the spectrum, Norton’s parental control comes from the full-featured Norton Online Family, available separately in free and Premier editions. BitDefender and Kaspersky include parental control that’s as good as some standalone utilities. If you want a suite with high-quality parental control, choose one of these three.
Backup and Tuneup Bonuses
Blame Microsoft’s now-defunct OneCare for adding backup and tuneup to the feature set expected in a suite. Not all vendors have fallen into line, and many that do add these features may offer a less-expensive suite without them.
Webroot and Trend Micro totally rule the backup category. To reach this pinnacle of success Webroot partnered with SugarSync while Trend Micro bought HumYo outright. Both offer 10 GB of online backup, but that’s just the start. They let you sync files between computers, access your files remotely, even securely share files and folders with friends. Webroot automatically formats folders full of pictures as photo albums for viewing and sharing. Simply amazing!
BitDefender and BullGuard stand out among the remaining suites. Both offer local backup plus 2 GB of online storage for BitDefender and 5 GB for BullGuard. For experts, BitDefender’s full-featured (if technical) backup utility will manage almost any kind of backup job or backup schedule.
Related Story Suite scores and pricing chart
Ad-Aware, Kaspersky, eScan, Trend Micro and Webroot offer simple tune-up utilities with expected features like cleaning browser history and deleting junk files. BitDefender adds impressive performance analysis, tracking use of memory, CPU, and resources. If a problem brings your system to a crawl you can find out which process caused it and even get a graph of the last hour. AVG takes a cost-plus approach; you can run one impressively thorough tuneup for free but continued use requires a separate purchase.
Though there’s no tune-up utility as such in Norton, its performance insight graphs detail recent resource usage, and you can click on a spike to see what caused it. In addition, proactive performance alerts pop up to warn if a process becomes a resource hog.
Having a safe backup stored offsite is the ultimate security. Webroot and Trend Micro give you that security with more storage than most and they let you access your backed-up files in incredibly useful ways.
Who’s the Boss?
As you can see, all of the suites in this collection have strong points, but some just have more of them. Norton boasts a brilliant firewall and its reputation-based malware detection gives it unusual stopping power. It also offers the best phishing protection and parental control. Kaspersky’s firewall is innovative and didn’t have much effect on performance. Webroot is strong in all areas except the firewall, and its backup system is a gem. But in the end the Editors’ Choice has to go to Norton, so far.
What About ZoneAlarm (or Norton 360, or…)
Note that there are still some suites to come for 2011, including notables like ZoneAlarm Extreme Security or Norton 360. As we review the stragglers, we’ll be sure to update this roundup. In the meanwhile, if you need a security suite today, you’ve already got some great choices. Read the rest of this story—view the slideshow—for thumbnail sketches of each suite. For more information on a particular suite, click the linked to navigate to the much longer full reviews.
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