Antivirus software uses a portion of your computer system’s resources while monitoring for malware, which may cause your computer to drag, interrupting even basic tasks such as attaching files to email messages, navigating the web, or playing games online.
For standard computers, the industry average lag time varies between 4 percent and 26 percent, depending on the task you are completing.
Top Ten Reviews tests the performance of antivirus programs by first recording a base time to complete each task without any antivirus software installed on our test computers. These tests are again run as each antivirus program conducts a full virus scan, and we compare this to the base time to find the average lag time. The final score reflects our in-house findings and results of independent labs, such as AV-Test and AV-Comparatives.
You can find these final scores in the comparison of the best antivirus software below.
