By: Marcus Jerräng
Translated by Anglo Rubicom AB

KASPERSKY, NOD32 and Bitdefender are three interesting newcomers on the antivirus market which have one thing in common: They all originate from Eastern Europe - to be precise from Russia, Slovakia and Rumania respectively.

We have known for some time that competent antivirus programs do not necessarily need to come from the large American companies such as Symantec and Network Associates. The Finnish F-Secure and the Spanish Panda have shown that small countries too are good at data security. The question then is, do the former Eastern states have anything with which they can compete?

Internet World has tested the new virus protection programs from the East - and the overall impression cannot be other than positive. Slovakia's NOD32 was particularly impressive and is the best antivirus program we have ever used.

EASY TO USE
If a security program is to be of use in a home-based office or in a small company, it must be easy to use. It should not be necessary to call on the services of computer technicians to protect your computer. Earlier forms of the Kaspersky Antivirus program and NOD32 however suffered from clumsy interfaces which were difficult for the ordinary PC user to understand.

Happily, the latest versions - Kaspersky 5.0 and NOD32 2.0 - have been dressed in new suits. Kaspersky is particularly accessible having, it seems, been inspired by the interfaces from Norton and McAfee. It is airy and clear with great big icons which show the functions.

How we did the test The programs were installed one at a time on a PC with Windows XP Professional, a 1.2 gigahertz processor and a 768 megabyte memory. We timed a test search on a 4.6 gigabyte section of a hard disk. All the files were searched. We even checked how much memory the programs required. We have tested the updating functions, judged the user-friendliness and weighed in the special functions. As regards the ability of the programs to find viruses, we have relied on external - but independent and respected - sources. The three test institutes whose results we used in our evaluations were Virus Bulletin, a journal on viruses which makes regular tests, and two organizations issuing certificates, namely ISCA Labs and West Coast Labs. Information on how the tests were carried out and the criteria used can be found on their respective sites: www.virusbtn.com www.icsalabs.com www.check-mark.com

NOD32 has a more 'professional' design. The minimalistic design is cool and it is easy to find the various settings, although, at the same time, it feels rather unnecessary to use technical terms and certain abbreviations in the program. There is however an excellent help-file with clear instructions.

Bitdefender is also easy to use, even if the interface is less attractive. Too much information on too small an area makes the layout confusing and it takes time to become accustomed to it.

STOP VIRUSES
With all due respect to being user-friendly, we still believe the most important feature of an antivirus program is that it stops viruses. And that it does so without feeling as if the computer is full of syrup. All three programs have been given good references by the three major authorities for the independent testing of antivirus programs: Virus Bulletin, ISCA Labs and West Coast Labs. So there can be no doubt that the programs do stop viruses. The three programs however differ in the way they use resources and in their speed. By far the slowest is Kaspersky, which took over half an hour to search through our hard disk, and which uses a lot of internal memory even when it is resting. Only after we switch off the real-time protection does the computer really feel fit for work. Naturally, this is a big negative - although we suspect that a computer with a faster processor would have fewer problems.

SLOWS DOWN THE COMPUTER
Bitdefender also takes a long time when searching, and slows down the computer. The biggest problem however is the irritatingly long time it takes to start up the program.

We should add that syrup and long search times are nothing unique for these two programs - most virus protection programs on the market have a marked effect on computer performance. The exception seems to be NOD32. We have never tested an antivirus program which is as user-friendly as NOD32.

The use of memory was less than half that of its competitors, and we were unable to detect any syrup effect when we used it. Furthermore, searches are carried out at great speed. We are truly amazed and can only applaud its performance.