A comparison test by AV-Comparatives shows that Microsoft Defender is one of the “heaviest” antivirus packages for Windows. Which package performs best?

Microsoft Defender is a popular antivirus program for Windows. This is not illogical, because the software is included as standard in the operating system and also offers you a sufficient level of security. Previous tests have already shown that this is not the most efficient solution. This is confirmed by AV-Comparatives, which conducts performance testing for popular antivirus suites three times a year.

AV-Comparatives tests the effects of the antivirus on various daily PC actions, such as downloading files, installing and opening applications, and surfing the Internet. A PC with an Intel i7 processor, SSD drivers, 8 GB of RAM and the 64-bit version of Windows 10 was used for the test. Since the performance of Windows 10 and Windows 11 are close, this test also gives a good idea of ​​how many resources each antivirus in Windows 11 uses in the background.

Greedy Microsoft Defender

According to AV-Comparatives, Microsoft Defender seems to be a pretty voracious antivirus program. In the final ranking, Defender takes second to last place with an impact score of 17 (the lower the score, the better), which AV-Comparatives assigns based on its own data and PC Mark benchmark scores. Only Total Defense has a higher impact.

The effects of Defender are noticeable, among other things, when installing applications and archiving files. The latter action is slow even when Defender is on your PC. These are also the weaknesses of Total Defense, which also affects copy speeds.

Defender is certainly not the only antivirus that can slow down Windows. Many popular antivirus suites, including Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and especially McAfee, cause applications to start slower. Eset received the best rating, which is hardly noticeable with an overall grade of 1.4.

The numbers roughly correspond to those of AV-Test, which also published its October report. Defender gets a score of 5.5 on a scale of six for its performance in this test, just like AVG, F-Secure, Norton and Total AV. AV-Test also sees delays in installing applications with Defender, where the built-in Windows antivirus performs well above average (34 percent compared to an average of 17 percent).