Headline: I used avast! in the past but now use Bitdefender Antivirus Plus combined with Malwarebytes Pro.
Bloat
I’ve used avast! for many years now. They had a nice bundle since I have so many PCs and did a great job at virus scanning. But as the years went on it had more and more features. But the final straw was that every time they had an update to their software, I would have to spend lots of time getting my system to work again. It would be nice if there was a simple test I could run, but I would “progressively discover” applications that were broken. It would usually take me about 3 hours up front and then I would continue to discover other issues over the next week.
One of the new “features” is to deep scan any new files, particularly .exe files. Well, as a software development guy I create new ones 20 to 50 times a day. And each time it wants to scan the “new potential security threat” taking as long as 30 seconds to do it. So I have to “re-exclude” my development directories again each time there is an update.
I just want something that’s pretty invisible and works. After the most recent update EVERYTHING stopped working (Twitter, Outlook, Chrome, IE, Skype) except Lync. So I finally had to go back to a restore point to get my work done yesterday. As a result I decided to investigate alternatives.
Not Effective
After a bit a research (not exhaustive) I settled on Bitdefender Antivirus Plus as well as Malwarebytes Pro.
Bitdefender Antivirus
After a few hours it found almost 90 infected files that avast! had missed.
Malwarebytes
In the first scan it found PUP.Optional.TopArcadeHits.A in my registry. I had pretty much given up on using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) in the past month. It turns out all the slow down was due to this. Now it’s working well again.
So, I hope I’m back on the road to productivity again.