Poor man's comparison of AV products

This is a limited, non-scientific comparison of AntiVirus products for Windows XP. I did the testing on an old machine running Windows XP SP3 with 512MB RAM.

The four AntiVirus options I compared were:

• avast! Home Edition - free for home use
• Microsoft Security Essentials - free for home use
• VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware - reasonably priced
• Nothing - that is right, no protection at all.

The things I compared were:

• The amount of memory being consumed after booting the machine. This is a rough indicator of how much memory is consumed by the AV software.
• The time to launch Portable Apps version of OpenOffice Calc for the first time. This is a cold launch. I used OpenOffice as it a notoriously slow application.
• The time to launch OpenOffice Calc for the second time. This is a warm launch.

The following graph shows the results for memory consumption:

The following graph shows the results for launch times:

I will let you draw your conclusions from the results above. Personally, I will be sticking with avast! Home Edition that I have been using for a while now.