I run a computer repair shop and sell used computers for a living. I'm not an expert by any means, but for the past few months things have been kind of slow and I've had plenty of spare time. I think most reviews are bullsh*t to say the least so I spent a little cash and a couple hundred hours in the past two months doing a little testing of my own.. and nobody paid me a dime for it.. nor will I get paid because my opinion means nothing.. but here's what I came up with:
If I were to choose between paid versions, with money as no object, I'd just download the free version Comodo and buy Malwarebytes, specifically for it's RT updating of malicious IPs and the website blocking feature.
It's funny how conspicuously Microsoft excludes Comodo and Malwarebytes from their website. All other AVs use a definition based system and a hueristics engine that generates mostly false reports. The paid version of malwarebytes and defense+ in the free version of CIS both virtualize the file system and isolate unrecognized applications in a virtual environment but let them run until they can be deemed either safe or malicious depending on what they try to do or until testing from the central support site confirms either. People who say Comodo is for advanced users, myself included in the past, just haven't read the manual. Kind of a sad excuse when trying to protect months or years of accumulated work..
When properly configured CIS 5.0 walks all over just about every other AV I've tested including MSE, Avast, and Norton Internet Security 2010 in terms of effectiveness and system load. Unless actively running a scan CIS running side by side with the full version of Malwarebytes on a 2Gb 64 bit windows 7 system only uses about 40MB of RAM and adds a total of 6 seconds to boot time, vs more than 120MB/ 20 seconds extra boot time for MSE alone, 140MB/ 24 seconds for Norton
I spent a lot of time looking for sites serving up malware, and found quite a few, but the only computer setups that never got infected with anything had malwarebytes with the protection module activated..and/or CIS with the sandbox active and defense plus set in clean PC mode, if you use them both correctly, I don't think there's much of anything that can get past it.. not to say anything is 100% effective
