Antivirus Software with  Mary Landesman

A Nod to NOD32

When readers were asked to provide feedback on the antivirus products they liked or disliked, I was sent a number of emails strongly in favor of NOD32.

After testing the product, I can see why.

Weighing in at just over 2MB, NOD32 should be the lightweight. Instead, they deliver a hefty punch at viruses, and all but eliminate the heavier competition.

Amazingly, this miniscule scanner trounced the competition with speedy scans of a mere 18 seconds, without missing a single infected file. Testing was performed on a Windows98 system, default install, with a small directory of 482 various types of files, including 11 infected. Average scan speed of competing products was 42.81 seconds.

NOD32 begins the pleasant user experience with a self-installing file that takes only moments to download. At the end of the install, the product asks if you wish to have real-time protection enabled and warns that concurrent use of real-time scanners can cause system conflicts. They also advise of the need to update the product and provide an option to do so at Windows startup.

For network admins, there's an option to create copies of the software on local network drives.

NOD32 also supports MAPI email scanning for Outlook and Exchange, again going the extra mile by offering an option to install it and telling users where to enable the option should they decide to do so at a later time.

The interface is clean, offering pre-configured scan tasks and the ability to easily add new ones. The only downside is that configuration options are global, affecting all tasks, and thus custom tasks can't be created with different options.

NOD32's track record of heuristics is legendary, detecting previously unknown viruses such as
Melissa, Love Letter, and MTX without requiring an update.

Priced at US$39 for a single user, it's clear they have a winning product.