Antivirus Test: A Quest for Nearly Objective Rankings

* AV: McAfee Infections found: 36,512 Comments: McAfee found 74 more malware than existed on the computer. Assuming that these 74 extra files were "false positives" and not the software alerting on Windows Updates, then this product had the most false positives of any I tested.

* AV: Norton (Symantec) Infections found: 20,404 Comments: The program installed easily and ran quickly, finishing in about 25 minutes. I was shocked though at the low number of malware that it flagged, so I restored the virtual machine and reinstalled NAV. After running it a second time I got the exact same results. So I tried a third time. Sad to say, what I thought would be the Gold Standard, only identified 56percent of the malware. But it did find this 56 percent three times in a row.

* AV: Panda Infections found: 31,719 Comments: Sixteen hours, 4 installs and 7 reboots after I started, I finally was able to get the software to scan. It found only 87 percent of the malware on the system. Lots of work for a disappointing low result.

* AV: PC Tools Infections found: 30,023 Comments: Endorsements from Dr Phil and www.MajorGeeks.com aside, this AV only caught 82.39 percent of malware on my computer. Not a much better than Clam (the other free AV in the test) and far from what I would install to protect my computer.

* AV: Protector Infections found: --- Comments: I was excited to try an AV product from India. Unhappily this one brings up a "nag screen" with each infection it discovers, requiring the user to "click here" to continue. Needless to say, I no intention of clicking through 36,438 nag screens. Plug pulled!