🚀 go-pugleaf

amc@cup.portal.com (Alan Michael Crawley) writes:

>Can anyone refer me to a performance comparison of various PC anti-
>virus products. (Comercial or PD).

Please note that as I am the primary author of one of the anti-virus programs
on the market (F-PROT), I am hardly unbiased :-)

I will not list the various reviews - I am sure other people can and will do
that, but I would like to mention a few points to beware.

There is no single comparison which is flawless, up-to-date and compares all
features, but maybe the biggest question is just which features you want to
compare.

Some comparisons primarily test the number of viruses detected. One problem
with some of those comparisons is that the virus collection may be provided
primarily by a single manufacturer.  This does not mean that the comparison
is invalid - but it explains the considerable differences between the
different comparisons. For example - most viruses in the VSUM collection
come from McAfee (producers of SCAN), so it is not surprising SCAN gets the
top marks there.   On the other hand, I provide the Virus Bulletin with most
of the viruses they use, so it is not surprising that my own product detects
practically 100% of the viruses there.  Occasionally some independent
parties have done a comparison, collected viruses from different sources,
and published the results.  The problem there is that in some cases the
collection has included considerable "garbage" - files which are not viruses.

The fact is that maintaining a complete virus collection takes a dedicated
virus researcher, and they are quite rare.  In fact, just about the only
independent researcher who attempts to maintain a complete collection and
compare the performance of the various scanners is Vesselin Bontchev at the
University of Hamburg.

However - simple comparisons of the number of viruses detected are not
everything.  If you are comparing features, quality of user-interfaces,
etc, you should read the reviews in the popular PC magazines (just ignore
the PCW review this October - It was so badly done that they apologized in
the November magazine and promised to do another review in the near future)

One word of warning - those types of reviews generally are good regarding the
non-technical stuff - If they say a product is easy to install, has a lousy,
slow user-interface, and takes up far too much memory, you can safely
expect them to be right. However - don't trust them to tell you how good
the products are at detecting or removing viruses....

-frisk