There are various factors that come into play when security solutions are concerned. Antivirus products come with a variety of facets, from the frequency of virus signatures update to a low rate of false positives, and from performance to keeping a low profile as a background process. Well, one of the aspects involved in determining performance is the speed at which a particular security product would perform an on-demand scan. By all means, you don't want to grow old in front of your machine, waiting for the antivirus to check your system. In this context, AV-Comparatives reveals that Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare speeds past products from Kaspersky and F-Secure, but is slower than what Symantec, BitDefender and McAfee have to offer.

"Some scanners may be slower than others due to various reasons. It has to be taken in account how reliable the detection rate of an anti-virus is; if the anti-virus product uses code emulation, if it is able to detect difficult polymorphic viruses, if it does a deep heuristic scan analysis, how depth and thorough the unpacking and unarchiving is, etc.", revealed Andreas Clementy, the head of the AV-Comparatives lab.

As you are able to see from the image integrated toward the bottom of this article, Windows Live OneCare 1.6.2111.30 bested the likes of Kaspersky AV 7.0.0.125; AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0.6353 from G DATA Security, and F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01.128. At the same time, OneCare underperformed in comparison to McAfee VirusScan 11.2.121, Norton Anti-Virus 14.0.3.3, NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.39, BitDefender Prof.+ 10.247 and FortiClient 3.0.459.

"The average scanning throughput rate (scan speed) is calculated by the size of the clean-set in MB's dicided by the time needed to finish the scan in seconds. The scanning throughput rate of this test can not be compared with future tests or with other tests, as it varies from the set of files used. The scanning spees tests were done under Windows XP SP2, on a PC with Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800EE 2.66 GHz, ASUS P5W WS Pro, 4096 MB DDR2-1150 Ram, SATA II disk and without a network connection", Clementy added.