Antiviruses
By dk ~ May 8th, 2008, 7:01 pm. Filed under: Comments.
My 5 cents on the eternal question — what antivirus is the best. During the last couple years I’ve tried several programs. I cannot say that one of them is definitely the best, but I want to share my impressions.
I installed the trial version of Symantec NAV 2007 included with a laptop. During 3 months it worked well, but my XP was perceptibly slower than usually. I’ve also tried NAV 2008 with Vista Ultimate, but got several BSoDs in first days of its usage. After all, I decided that NAV is not a product I want to use further and purchased Dr.Web. I know those people personally and therefore I trust them. I really like the last versions being released after the newly created company “Doctor Web” was headed by Mr. Boris Sharov in 2003. The essential principles of our products (e.g. PrivacyKeyboard) and Dr.Web are somewhat similar — we are trying to pull down our protection technologies as low as possible on the level of system kernel in order to make sure we work lower than any malicious piece of code. As a result, we can do some tricks unattainable for many other vendors. For example, Dr.Web is the first who can combat the rootkit Rustock.C. Nevertheless, after my yearly subscription to Dr.Web had expired, I wanted to try something new. It was interesting, how effective a free antivirus tool could be. So I downloaded and installed Avast. Well, I cannot say it is a bad program, it has been working normally for several months, but quite often false alerts are really annoying. For example, an empty header in RSS news item was considered as potentially harmful code. Avast reminds a user about itself constantly, even by voice notifications about new updates. I prefer the programs that operate quietly and do not draw my attention away from my work. The final straw was unstable operation of Avast after some updates of Vista Ultimate. About a couple weeks I faced unpredictable BSoDs, after that a new version of Avast was released and the problem was solved. Anyway, it has left a bit nasty taste.
At last, I decided to try Microsoft Forefront Client Security. I use it for about 2 or 3 months and up to this moment I’m happy with it. The simplest configuration on 1 PC without any reporting features etc. Very fast, very stable, transparent. It has given no one false alert while detecting and blocking real threats. By the way, Forefront Client Security has successfully passed the April’s Virus Bulletin tests under Windows Vista SP1 and received VB100 award. Definitely, my next step will be to deploy a corporate configuration with centralized management and reporting.
