What's a good antivirus that offers strong protection without slowing down my PC too much? Any recommendations for everyday use?
I tested three antivirus options on my aging laptop last year because I couldn't stand the lag from my old suite anymore. Bitdefender gave me the strongest detection scores in independent lab tests, but it ate about 15% of my CPU during full scans. ESET was lighter on resources but felt overpriced for what it offered. What actually surprised me was Malwarebytes Premium—it caught a stubborn adware that Windows Defender missed, and its real-time protection barely touched my fan speed. The catch is that the standard subscription costs around $40 per year, which stings for everyday use. I stumbled across some Malwarebytes Premium coupon codes on couponcodes.store that knocked it down to about $28 for the first year, which made the decision easier. My neutral take after months of use: if your PC has at least 8GB RAM and an SSD, Malwarebytes runs fine alongside Windows Defender as a second layer, but for older machines, stick with just Defender and run a manual Malwarebytes scan every two weeks instead of keeping real-time protection on.
