Antivirus – A necessary evil

Today, with spyware, viruses and their friends circulating everywhere you only have two choices: getting an antivirus software or getting infected, and for the majority of us go for the first. However, most companies who produce antivirus today seems to have missed something very important. Yes, you want to have a computer free of malware, but you don’t want the software that makes it stay that way impact on performance. I’ve seen far too many examples of antivirus that has excessive CPU usage when you’re copying files or extracting large archives. Among these are: McAfee, Panda, F-secure, Norton; many of the major antivirus vendors. The only one that I’ve found so far that suits this simple need is NOD32, which I’m quite happy with though it’s GUI lacks some features. Another feature that I miss in some of them is the option to exclude certain files and folders (The only one I can remeber missing this is Panda). I think the antivirus companies should focus more on the purpose of their software (Doing it’s job in the bakground without being noticed) instead of eyecandy which there’s quite a lot of in most antvirus products today.