Microsoft Defender is found to be one of the worst performers in AV-Comparatives test suite which measured performance impact by anti-malware apps. AV-TEST also found similar results.
This past week, we reported a problem wherein users found their newly installed Windows 11 23H2 systems were getting bogged down, and for some of these people, resetting Defender fixed the issue. While this problem falls into the category of a bug and not a characteristic of Defender, past anti-malware assessments have shown that Microsoft Defender does hog the system a bit, though it is not alone in that regard.
Both AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives released their newest assessment report recently and in this article, we look at how the various anti-virus products that were tested stack up in terms of system/performance impact. (Check this article instead if you are looking for details regarding malware detection ranking.)
First up, we have the results of AV-Comparatives’ October 2023 Performance Test. While Microsoft Defender was good in most of the categories, it did not fare too well at archiving/ unarchiving (compression/decompression).
The testing was conducted on Windows 10 64-bit and if you are wondering how much of a difference a Windows 11 system could make, we recently tested two separate scenarios where we compared Windows 10 with a clean Windows 11 build and an in-place upgrade.
