In a head to head test of AVG and Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009, The Hypervisor lab results show the Kaspersky suite discovered and removed more Trojan and virus software than AVG. However, neither package was able to completely clean our PC and we needed to format the hard disk and reinstall Windows to fully fix the problem.

How we tested

One of The Hypervisor laptops had been infected by a nasty virus. Symptoms included a new desktop wallpaper from the Malware telling us our PC was infected and asking us to download Antivirus 2009, which we presume was more malware. Also, the system would crash every five or ten minutes after starting. We used the free trial versions of both suits for our tests. We started by installing AVG and running a full scan. The suit found several viruses and Trojans, but the PC was unable to run a full scan before it crashed or was rebooted by the virus software. When we restarted the PC and re-launched the scan, the scan started from the beginning each time.

Next we removed AVG and installed Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009. Initially the Kaspersky suite would not install, and a message asked us to uninstall AVG. This seemed strange because we had already uninstalled AVG, but we searched the registry and deleted several keys beginning with “AVG”. Following this registry clean-up we were able to install the Kaspersky suite. Scans by Kaspersky found Trojans and other malware that AVG had missed, and when a Kaspersky scan was interrupted by a reboot, the scan would continue from where it had left off.

Overall then, we were more impressed by Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 than AVG.
Of course, our tests were not exhaustive, and it is possible that AVG would find other viruses that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 would not. Even so, we think our results are useful enough that we should not keep them buried in our Lab.