NOD32 Anti-Virus System: Less Bloat and Good Results

There are times where I feel like breaking into a rendition of The Impossible Dream from the musical Man of La Mancha, (don’t worry I won’t) as I continue my quest to find a preferred anti-virus product. The quest always continues because I just don’t like the hit I have to swallow on my system by installing anti this and anti that products. Call me stubborn. I know I am. It is not that I have experienced much trouble with viruses, trojans, and the like. One reason for that is that I’ve made sure I’ve kept my systems protected, albeit begrudgingly. But the cost in terms of system resources for this kind of protection has always been a steep one. And on smaller mobile devices the cost is more keenly felt. Especially if you use one of the big security suites. In fact it really imitates me to see these system hogs loaded up on new machines. I know the only way to truly get rid of them in order to move to a less cumbersome product is to reinstall from scratch.

With the move to Vista I’ve been looking at different solutions and the one I had been comfortable with for some time, AVG, was doing its job well. But I had heard good things about NOD32 as a solution. NOD32 is consistently rated highly in the VB100 testing. (In fact, I was quite surprised to see a couple of very recognizable names that didn’t pass the test in the latest round.) In addition to its excellent record of catching and eliminating threats, it comes recommended as the anti-virus product that will drag your system down the least.

A brief side note here.  During one presentation I sat through while attending the Vista Labs during CES, a speaker talked about how we were all used to multi-tasking and to demonstrate his point he put up a slide that showed an array of anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-adware products running. The speaker’s point is well taken, but with every step up in processor evolution leading to increased performance, it seems we run the risk of offsetting the gains by having to load up with protective measures. Especially when the developers of these products keep adding bloat into the mix. More on that another day in another post.

The bottom line for this post is that I’m now running NOD32 and things appear to operate as advertised. My system is definitely a bit snappier. I’ve set up two scans to run in the background while I’m doing other tasks and I’ve hardly noticed any performance hit. I like the configurability and I also like the less is more approach to the UI. NOD32 did catch a couple of things in my junk email folder in Outlook that were not flagged by AVG, so I also give it kudos for that.

I’m not one to set up a number of testing scenarios on this issue, nor am I an expert on this kind of technology. But I’ll be keeping an eye on NOD32 over the next period of time to see if it fulfills my needs and I’ll certainly report back. For now, after a week or so of testing, I’m very satisfied.

Check out NOD32 here.