How Are Antivirus Software Rated?

Rating antivirus software can often be a very subjective topic. Each reviewer or expert has their own set of parameters or guides which they prefer to put the software through. This hampers the comparison of different antivirus tools when they are rated by different reviewers.

Some of the typical ratings used include ease of use of software, effectiveness against known virus, ease of installation, type of features available, frequency of updates, cost of the software and virus definitions. These are the usual parameters that experts look at when they review antivirus software, but they will also look into so much more than just the above factors, as these parameters can often be criticized to be superficial and not in depth enough to compare different software packages effectively.

Going in to greater details, reviewers will start to look at the scanning abilities of each tool. This includes the manual scanning, on-demand scanning, background scanning, scheduled scanning capabilities, scanning of emails, instant messages, adware scanning. They will also look at the memory usage of the tools, as there are some tools that require a large cache or memory space to run. The availability and effectiveness of its firewall are also evaluated when comparing antivirus tools.

Some of the software programs, including AVG virus protection software, ESET Nod 32, Kaspersky Antivirus, McAfee Virus Scan, Norton AntiVirus, and Avira antivirus protection software, have received glowing reviews and looks set to becoming the industry leaders. Moreover these antivirus programs enjoy the best reviews both online and off-internet and they often come up as the top in most antivirus software program reviews.