In November 2002, I was attending COMDEX in Las Vegas. As I walked the show floor, I found a booth from a company called Hauri that was marketing an antivirus product called ViRobot Expert. I had a few minutes before I had to leave for the airport, so I decided to talk to the representatives from Hauri and see if its product was worth further review.
During my conversation, I found out that although I had never heard of Hauri or ViRobot, Hauri had been a major player in the Asian antivirus market for a few years, but was just beginning to market the product in the United States. During our conversation, the Hauri sales representative made all sorts of outrageous claims about the product that I didn’t quite believe and assumed were just hype. Sensing my disbelief, the sales representative gave me a copy of the software and told me to take it home, put it through the paces, and call him and let him know what I thought of it.
After several months of testing and probing, I can tell you that the Hauri rep’s claims are all legitimate. I have tested ViRobot inside and out and can honestly say that it is the best antivirus software that I have ever used. I have purchased the enterprise version of the software and use it to protect my own computer network. ViRobot is one of those rare pieces of software that truly distinguishes itself from the competition because it is so outstanding.
Why ViRobot Expert?
ViRobot Expert is the desktop product in Hauri’s line of ViRobot antivirus software. This software is suitable for both home office users and for network workstations within a corporation. The software is designed to run in Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000 Professional, and XP. Hauri also makes versions of ViRobot for UNIX, Linux, and Windows servers. There is even a version of ViRobot for Microsoft Exchange.
What makes ViRobot so special? In short, ViRobot can completely reverse the damage caused by some of the most common viruses. Many of the leading antivirus products simply quarantine infected files or delete them. However, ViRobot is able to remove the infection and return the file to its original state.
The other thing that I like about ViRobot is that the scanning engine is extremely efficient. We’ve all seen situations in which someone will run a full system scan on a PC and the PC will slow to a crawl and become almost completely unusable until the scan completes. However, ViRobot is designed to have extremely low processor overhead. In fact, your users may not even know that a full system scan is running. On my test PC, a full system scan pushed my Pentium 4 machine to a mere 4 percent processor utilisation. The low processor utilisation makes ViRobot perfect for people who don’t want to get slowed down by their antivirus software or for anyone who has an older machine that has trouble efficiently running other antivirus packages.
Like other leading antivirus products, ViRobot Expert has a resident scanning engine that examines files as they are accessed. The software also integrates itself into Internet Explorer and into Microsoft Outlook. In doing so, ViRobot protects you against Internet-based and e-mail viruses.
By far, the software’s coolest feature is that it can actually monitor individual running processes on your machine and look for viral code within them. If a running process is found to contain viral code, the software will alert you to the infection and give you a chance to save your work. It will then shut down the infected process, disinfect the code, and then restart the previously infected application. Within a few seconds, you can resume work as though nothing had ever happened.
The icing on the cake is that virus definition updates are handled seamlessly. With a broadband Internet connection, the software will automatically download and install updates as they become available. I have been using ViRobot Expert for the better part of a year now and have never once been prompted by the software to install an update or to reboot the system. Furthermore, Hauri doesn’t just update the virus definitions. The company routinely makes updates to the ViRobot Expert system files. These application updates are handled in the same seamless manner as the virus definitions.
So how good is it?
Everything that I have told you about the software so far is based on my own personal experience, but I do have some additional information that you can use to quantify ViRobot’s performance. For starters, ViRobot has recently been awarded VB 100 percent certification by Virus Bulletin. The software has also received Level 1, Level 2, and Trojan certification from Checkmark. The Level 1 certification guarantees that the software can detect every virus that is currently in the wild (or capable of infecting your computer). The Level 2 certification guarantees that the software is capable of eliminating every virus that’s in the wild. The Trojan certification guarantees that the software will detect most known Trojans. Although no certifications currently exist for it, the software is also capable of catching some adware and spyware, and even detects certain hacker tools on a user’s hard drive.
ViRobot has also been awarded the Designed For Windows XP seal. This seal is awarded by Microsoft to companies that design software that is 100 percent Windows XP-compatible. Over 60 antivirus companies have applied for this seal, but only five have actually received it.
Acquiring ViRobot Expert
You can purchase ViRobot Expert directly from its Web site for US$29.95. The software includes a year’s worth of virus definition updates. Once the subscription expires, the renewal cost is US$15 per year. Hauri is also known to substantially discount the price for companies that have hundreds of workstations or for nonprofit organisations. Hauri also offers free 30-day trial versions of ViRobot Expert, ViRobot Advanced Server (the Windows server product), and ViRobot for Exchange 2000. You can download these trials from Hauri’s Web site.
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