AV-Comparatives invited all to take a survey about what was wanted most in AV protection.



Since it was purely voluntary, the statistical quantities are skewed, but with 6,400 respondents, it has some significant insights.

The respondents came from Europe (46 percent), Asia (23 percent), and then North America with 18 percent.

OS's broke down as half the respondents specifically reported using Windows 7; another third had upgraded to Windows 8 or 8.1. As for Mac and Linux users, they could at least gloat over beating out Windows Vista, which came in at just 1 percent.

How did they choose their AV product? The vast majority (60 percent) said their choice was based on good scores in independent tests. Three quarters said they had no recent problems with antivirus protection, but 4.4 percent reported a protection failure within the last week.

So what was the most important aspect of their decision? 64 percent chose low impact on system performance. Next came good detection of malware and malicious behavior while the rest wanted "good malware removal/cleaning abilities."

The full report includes a wealth of additional detail.

Source: PCMag