Antivirus Test: A Quest for Nearly Objective Rankings

* AV: Dr. Web CureIt Infections found: --- Comments: This is the free version of the Dr Web software product. It took the Spartan interface and stripped it down to basically an "on" and "off" button. The software promises to "quickly scan and cure" computer infections. In my case, though, after scanning for 7 hours and 10 minutes it found 137,286 infections after scanning only 7,711 files. Extrapolating this data, the scan would have taken 34 hours and found almost 600,000 infections. I pulled the plug.

* AV: eScan Infections found: 36,146 Comments: Surprisingly, this unknown (at least to me) AV vendor found the second highest number of malware. The scanning times were average but it outperformed many other better known brands with 99.19 percent detection. Ranks in second place.

* AV: ESET Infections found: 23,746 Comments: Took 4 hours to scan all malware but the accuracy of the scanner has this product finishing in the bottom half of the test. This software recognized only 65 percent of all malware. Clam the free AV performed better.

* AV: File Sentry Infections found: 111 Comments: Yes, after running the test twice, reinstalling and running again, the AV still only found 111 malware. I wonder if AVG and File Sentry are using a common AV engine. This would explain the very low, and almost identical number of infections found. It does not however explain the overall poor performance of these two AV products.

* AV: F-Prot Infections found: 32,635 Comments: I received the error message that the "maximum entry count reached". The "Report" window in the GUI had about 500 entries before the error appeared. This scanner ran longer than most taking 12 hours and 5 minutes to scan all data files.