PCMag just did a review of the major A/V and Malware protections: http://www.pcmag.com...,2388652,00.asp
In general, I agree... except for Norton, McAfee and Kaspersky.... I just don't go there anymore.
Remember, what is great today may not be so great next month/year... (eg. Norton's and McAfee). I used to use AVG but as a PC wrench, I always needed to stay up to date on such things and in the process of "fixing" a lot of other people's machines that became contaminated I became more concerned about the collateral damages that many of these "fixers" caused the hosting machines.
In the end, I settled down to Avast and AVG. They go on easy, don't consume a lot of system resources to do what they do and can be successfully removed without having to resort to the ultimate removal tool.... FDISK / Format.
Microsoft Essentials has seemed to catch all the stuff that may rarely get to my system but I have seen many times that system performance has been hurt by 50% or more due to MSE operations (according to the Task Manager performance tool).
If an infection does occur and whatever I have running does not kill it AND successfully remove it, I immediately go to MalwareBytes for the best removal with the least risk and trouble. In some cases, detecting an invasion does not automatically mean that it has been killed or removed, too and in a few cases, it took 2 or more runs of the removal processes to actually get rid of the infection.
There is no advantage to having a 100% protection rate if 100% of the time the protection software degrades your system's performance and interferes with the installation / removal of other software and drivers (i.e.. Norton's, McAfee, Kaspersky).
My first choice on Windows 7 and 8 is to just let MSE do its thing. If you find that you are still picking up vermin, set up limited and strongly protected non-administratively enabled users for others that use your machine and for heaven's sake quit pulling executables from UseNet and stop visiting porn sites!
ttfn
Budd
