Tag Archive for 'antivirus'

Comodo: a free antivirus/firewall solution vs. ESET Smart Security

Update 2: I’ve given this prod­uct some real life usage tests. I must con­clude that the antivirus component’s per­for­mance is slow, ugly and unac­cept­able. I was fooled by its small foot­print (memory usage), but the scan­ning speed is slow and it effec­tively ren­ders my com­puter unus­able when I am doing any slightly more demand­ing oper­a­tions. Bot­tom­line: Stray away from this if you want any per­for­mance at all – for that pur­pose, I’d say ESET AntiVirus is still the best

Update: Unfor­tu­nately, after some test­ing, I just real­ized Comodo’s UI still requires the use of a mouse. Although it has slightly more options than ESET’s fire­wall, the manda­tory use of mouse still sucks.

In the past I’ve always used the com­mer­cial NOD32 Antivirus. Since ver­sion 3 it has also included a fire­wall in the ESET Smart Secu­rity. I have been quite sat­is­fied with NOD32 Antivirus since it has a solid detec­tion rate and more impor­tantly to me, very min­i­mal use of system resources. This is unlike say Norton, which is noto­ri­ous for eating up 50% of your system resources even when it is doing observ­ably nothing.

Recently though, I started get­ting annoyed enough by ESET’s firewall’s user inter­face. Simply put, I’m get­ting really annoyed by the fact that I have to con­stantly click the fre­qently appear­ing pop ups. What’s worse, the pop ups must be clicked by a mouse – it doesn’t sup­port using a key­board with tab­bing to the right button.

That’s not too bad though, after maybe a year of using it, I’ve learned of its con­fig­u­ra­tion enough so that I could set up rules to pre­vent the pop ups from appear­ing so fre­quently, but the occas­sional pop ups that appear finally drove me to inves­ti­gate into better solutions.

Then I found Comodo Inter­net Secu­rity – which comes with an Antivirus and a Firewall.

Comodo has been well known for its fire­wall, but the Antivirus com­po­nent is the company’s new inven­tion – this is like the reverse of ESET, which is best known for its antivirus but then expanded its market to fire­wall too.

I still haven’t used Comodo long enough to do a com­pre­hen­sive review of the two, but there’s one thing that I can say for cer­tain: Comodo’s user inter­face is so much nicer and pro­vides much more options than ESET.

And from some­where I’ve read, per­for­mance and low system resources usage is one of the design philoso­phies of the Comodo’s team. I forgot where exactly but I think I read it from the Comodo’s offi­cial forum – you can prob­a­bly take a look and you’ll quickly real­ize how inter­ac­tive the sup­port staff are in the forum – some­thing that blew my expec­ta­tion for a free product.

So, give it a try for this free secu­rity prod­uct, it’s def­i­nitely not wosre, if not way better than, most of its paid counterparts.