Critics maintain that protection software for Windows really puts the brakes on PCs. In a 14-month, extremely comprehensive performance endurance test, AV-TEST examined the trade-off of performance versus protection, and came up with some conclusive answers.
For the reader of an endurance test, the provided rating for speed or performance of a product is only expressed in one single aggregate number. For the tester in the laboratory, it's a long journey to arrive at this number. To get there, he had to accompany a solution through 7 test rounds over 14 months. Of the 19,000 individual ratings per product, 35 test area findings were aggregated. It requires this time and effort to arrive at the rating for a single product. In the current endurance test from January 2014 to the end of February 2015, a total of 23 products were tested for speed in the labs at AV-TEST. In this, the tests alternated in the use of the operating systems
Windows XP, 7 and 8.1.
