I decided to test another virus scanner. I’m generally not interested in them, but there are people who are, and I’d like to be in a position to give a favorable recommendation for one or the other. It’s always easy to name the ones I don’t like (NAV, Antivir), or won’t trust again (AVG), and my recommendation so far has been for avast!, although the user interface it forces on you is really, really terrible.
So now I’m checking out NOD32 (30 day trial). It gets pretty good review, the interface is nice and clean, and it seems to be much less of a system hog. I like that I can really customize what it does – I especially don’t like my virus scanner to scan every file I touch, because that seriously cramps my compile times. So far the only fault I can find is with the explorer menu, and the lack of an option to turn off the balloon that comes up every time it updates its virus definitions.
What’s the problem with Antivir?
With Antivir, I find the update mechanism is too loud. I regularly sit at PCs that tell me the database is several days out of date, which tells me that letting the user control when to download updates is a Bad Idea. The update mechanism also downloads way too much data for my taste, my impression was that they re-download the whole database each time.
The scanning engine is slow, the feature set rather limited (no scanning of emails), and it’s not configurable to my taste (I like turning off a lot of the more esoteric protection in favor of speed).
And last but not least, the personal edition is nagware: It has a tendency to pop up windows asking the user to register or popping up advertisements for their products.
I have just extended the premium license for another year. The third year that is. I decided to buy a license, because the premium version provides protection against spyware and adware.
It also does do email scanning and saves you from all nag-screens.
In terms of slow scanning: I only scanned the entire HD once at the very first installation. Afterwards it provides real time scanning, which I do not find slow.
Generally I found it to be a slick, unannoying piece of software which is well worth 20 measly euro-bucks a year and I do not expect this kind of service to be available for free.
Antivir has not paid me for writing this.