A few weeks ago I wrote about the security applications I used on my own PC. I made the statement that I don’t like security suites, preferring stand-alone programs that tend to do one job well and take up fewer resources than the big cludgy suites like McAfee, Norton and ZoneAlarm. (Forget AOL! It should be declared an Internet traffic hazard.)
At that time I was using ESET’s excellent NOD-32 anti-virus, along with Comodo’s Firewall Pro and Comodo BOClean anti-malware, backed up with Ad-Aware SE Personal. NOD32 and Comodo Firewall Pro were the top-rated programs in their respective classes, and BOClean rates right up there along with them. Both Comodo products have the additional advantage of being free, while NOD32 is a steal at $29.95 a year for a two-year subscription.
Those are still excellent choices, together or separately. The firewall, however, had a bug that — despite my downloading and reinstalling several updates — would not go away. It would forget my allowed applications, and would randomly pop up a complaint about Firefox, or tell me that the anti-virus wanted to access the Internet. I was moderately annoyed, but it drove my lovely bride nuts. (A superb psychotherapist, she is somewhat cyber-challenged, though mostly through lack of exposure.) Comodo was wearing out its welcome, and looking around the Web for solutions to the pop-ups was fruitless.
BOClean was doing its job, but — while it didn’t affect my 3.2 Pentium D home machine — it slows down the old Athlon 2800+ at work quite a bit. Since I do some processor-intensive stuff from time to time on the home machine (big image files), I thought I might look at replacing it anyway, when I got around to it.
On November 5th, ESET released their Smart Security suite from beta, incorporating NOD v.3. As it happened, my subscription for NOD32 expired on the 6th. Smart Security is priced a bit higher than NOD32 was, but includes a firewall, malware protection and a spam blocker. Since I use Gmail I don’t worry about spam, but the suite sounded like a good solution, and it got excellent reviews on the Web. So, since ESET were offering me an upgrade discount, I figured what the heck. I wanted the NOD32 v. 3 upgrade anyway, so didn’t have much to lose.
After installing ESET Smart Security, the first thing I did was check to make sure it had downloaded all necessary updates. Then I ran a bunch of online security checks. ESS passed them all with flying colors. I already knew I had (arguably) the best anti-virus around, and the firewall and malware applications seem to be flawless as well. The whole shebang takes up less than 40 MB of RAM, and there is no discernible hit on performance, even during scans, although that might not be true of some older single-processor machines. I backed up the malware scanner with Spybot Search and Destroy, and I’m a happy, un-hassled cybercamper. Best of all, the stupid warnings are gone, gone, gone. (Comodo, take note…)
You could do worse. In fact, considering some of the tales I’ve heard about certain “name brand” suites, you could do a whole bunch worse. This suite rocks, and they seem to have avoided the kitchen sink approach. That’s what happens when you write code from scratch (Micro$oft, take note…) and we’ll see if ESET’s next release lives up to their first entry into the security suite business.
[tags]anti-virus, malware, spam, ESET Smart Security, computer security[/tags]