ESET NOD32 3.0 Antivirus System (Windows)

By Robert Vamosi, CNET.com on 26 May 2008 10:32 AM

Tags: eset, nod32, antivirus, windows, test, advanced, seconds, scan

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No mention of the outage of la ...None -- 27/05/08

No mention of the outage of last week where NOD32 caused Windows machines all around the world to become unresponsive?

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I've tried both, and I fully a ...Agent24 -- 01/06/08

I've tried both, and I fully agree that the new interface is a lot better than the old version, It certainly suits Vista's Aero theme well too.

At the moment I'm using the trial but already it seems very good

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A year later than this review, ...Goyta' F. Villela Jr. -- 18/05/09

A year later than this review, I am evaluating NOD32 4.0 (not 3.0) because it is one of the few antivirus programs already compatible with Windows 7 (RC). I just ran my first full scan, and configured it for "no cleaning" because I wanted to see what it found first, in case there were false alarms and I ran into trouble if it deleted valid vital files (which, as I found out, it could have done).

There were indeed quite a few false alarms (37, to be more precise, even with heuristics set to medium) - for example, a RAR archive containing only MS-Word and PDF documents from 6 years ago that has not been opened in years, but NOD32 marked as containing a "probably unknown NewHeur_PE virus."

The log also contained *hundreds* of archives and setup programs that it could not open and were not scanned. I was expecting to find some easy right-click option for the log entries to mark the false alarms as trusted, or clean/delete/quarantine the suspicious files, as Kaspersky does (even in the clumsy 2009 edition), but there is none. I found out that I had to manually enter all exclusions one by one in another window, then run another scan (either a full one - which takes 7 hours for my 400 GB of files - or one manually for each of the affected files or folders), this time with the "standard" or "strict" option.

With all these problems, I am only not giving NOD32 4.0 a "poor" rating because the detection rate is really outstanding - maybe even *too* good. But I don't find it practical for routine use. I'll be trying Avira next, but I'll probably go back to Kaspersky in the end, complemented with occasional on-line scans with other programs.

The good: Very good detection rate - probably too good. It found one real spyware infection that no other software had (both antivirus or spyware detectors). As of May 2009, it is already compatible with Windows 7 RC.

The bad: Now the interface is *too* simple and can leave you clueless about how to do what you want - where is the option for it? Too many false alarms. It can't open and scan many kinds of archives and installation files. No easy way (e.g., right-click) to process files according to your judgment after a scan.

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