Originally Posted by
8-Bit
ESET is light weight when looking at commercial alternatives to Windows Defender. I also don't think Windows Defender is as lightweight as it used to be, as when I do the occasional format of my computer and am waiting to install chrome or some other executable before I end up using group policy settings to disable it, Windows Antimalware Service is using up 49% of my CPU, though this is probably an active scan of files being downloaded, but you can definitely feel it hang. Another issue I have with it is that after you've told it to exclude the same file/folder for the 4th/5th time and a windows update overrides your settings I moved on from it personally.
ESET comes off the back of NOD32 Antivirus which led the way for a very long time in being the most comprehensive and accurate in virus definitions without raising false positives like Avast and AVG which I haven't used in the past 3-4 years, but even in the last decade were really notorious for throwing false positives on keygen/cracked software. ESET doesn't do this and it's got the standard license fee pretty much any commercial AV/Security Suite is gonna have $49/annual. I imagine if you did top 5 antivirus/security suites you'd see it. Honorable mention to BitDefender, but I'm too old to switch and ESET does what I need it to do. Main cons with ESET is it likes to overprotect, especially blocking you from sites as it has a web protection feature and if the page you are about to visit has any dodgy js/adware on it, you won't be allowed to access it at all unless you turn the web protection off. For the most part, I'm fine with that out of the box, but sometimes there are sites I have to visit and then I will follow up later and do a scan to see if anything was actually downloaded and generally speaking there wasn't.
You get what you pay for at the end of the day imo. WinDef is a great free option, probably best free option. Beyond that look towards BitDef/Eset.
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