ArcaVir 2005 - REVIEW

I agree Firecat with the above statement.

This is where the majority of the market is. I do a lot of image molding and marketing. I can tell you that without a professional looking package, 99% of all products are certain to fail. I consider myself a voice for the masses, as I am not very technical.

With utmost respect, (to Stormbyte, and Arcavir). I know that a lot of effort has gone into your product, and it may very well be one of the best. However it is probably the ugliest interface I have seen on an AV, and because of this I would not even try it.

 

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Mariusz

ps. there is new interface planed for the 2006 version, but as far as I know, there is no way to make everyone happy.

 

Your right about not being able to please everyone.

However, from what I have seen, you offer superior support, which nowadays seems a thing of the past with many products.

And the Technical people really like Arcavir, and as you know from this board Stormbyte, thats not the easiest thing to do.

 

Take a look at DrWeb's interface, an excellent AV but the interface is awful.
I personally do not like all the red that ArcaVir's interface uses and a few other things, but I do not open it and look at it unless I need to.

99% of the masses probably would not know proffessional graphics from amateur graphics, they just like what is pleasing to the eyes + some eye candy, and that is my biggest issue with the color red, too much of it is hard on the eyes.
I do agree however that it is not as proffesional looking as it could be.

But you can't please everyone. LOL

 

I agree Honyak, and in fact I was just coming back to clarify why I do not like the interface.

Brown, red and electric green are just not that pleaseing to the eye.

From much research and seminars I have attended colours and layout are a big part of the presentation (re: what looks good to the eye)

From what I have learned :

Black is probably the best colour for using for printed matter.

Yellow is a safe neutral colour (which is probably part of the allure many have with Norton. Which I will wade in even further and say to me has the best interface)

Red has been found to be strong with men

While blue is the most pleasing to women

 

So women like F-Secure

 

LOL I knew that was coming.

Actually those in the know tend to put a little more weight on quality of product. Like Stormbyte said it is hard to please everyone. Companies spend Billions tring to find out what will get people to buy their product. Colour is only one part of the puzzle, but it is one of the very first things that a consumer sees. That first few seconds are usually what makes or breaks a sale.

Wading in even deeper, I will look a food sales. Pop companies will spend millions on securing the right spokesperson for their product. Now take away the spokesperson, run the same number of ads, lower the price and your sales will lower. Seems backwards.

Image is everything to many people. Like Honyak said, it is eye candy, or smoke and mirrors if you perfer.

Anyways enough on the subject by me. I just wanted to state what MHO was. As Stormbyte pointed out they are working on a new interface. Which shows that companies are always trying to improve their product, as sales is the bottom line.

EDIT:
As one last note. There are manys things on the web that will better inform you about colour and sales. I have included 2 links from ad agencies, and the first thing they talk about is colour.
http://www.imagingsolutions.net/Color_Rocks.htm

http://www.marketilluminations.com/seminars.shtml

 

Mariusz said a new interface is coming . That said , let us concentrate on the AV itself . I now use this product . Although it is early on , I find it to be very efficient . No slowdown noticed here but , as FireCat said , check for POP filtering . I believe as time goes by , this AV will rate at the top . Mariusz is already looking into how to get this product inducted into differing tests . In MY real world , thus far , it is working like a champ . I have purposely gone where I should not go . It has caught everything trying to get on my system . And , I backed this up by running a scan with another AV that found I was clean . No false Positives yet . I think the talk of possible FP's is overblown now . Most of that seems to have been worked out . And the support IS excellent ! It took them awhile this last time but , they are in the process of moving . And they will jump on any problem you may nave to try to reproduce it and get it fixed if it is in their product . I love this thing now . I truly do . Hope that may help someone

 

I am now using Arcavir after seeing it reviewed and discussed on the forums, and am very pleased with it working well on my system. I noticed the above quote and have a question for someone to answer. I have the firewall in Arcavir enabled and I followed the link to www.hackercheck.com and had my ports scanned. I did not receive 100% as above, as it said that I had problems with ports 22, 53, and 80 with a brief explanation. (All other ports it said were secure) However when I had the ports scanned via the GRC Gibson site and also the Sygate site, both of these say that all ports are fully stealth and there are no problems.
Is this something to do with protocols? I know that GRC and Sygate scan using TCP. Was the Hackercheck site scanning with UDP? Although it did not say anything about protocols as far as I could see. I am puzzled.
Sorry this comment is about firewalls in the antivirus section, but i was following the above quote with my question. Thanks.

hollingwood

 

On my PC, ArcaVir firewall still does well at hackercheck.com

 

Interesting product. I ran it with the highest level of heuristics and it flagged Security Task Mananger (taskman.exe) and Unhackme (unhackme.com) as having "suspicious code". False positives - but it does indicate that their heuristics is able to catch executables that hook into the system. I like this. Do products like NOD32 and KAV have equivalent capabiilties and have simply adjusted so that there are no FPs, or is ArcaVir doing something special here? Any comments?

Rich

 

I think NOD32 can do just as well as ArcaVir in heuristics (maybe better ), just that NOD heuristics are very fine-tuned till now (at least thats how I figure it).

KAV really does not have too much in the heuristics department.

 

Thanks Firecat. It's always tough to say on these kind of things. Really good heuristics would filter out all "trusted apps", but only the vendor's developers really know for sure. I am looking forward to any retrospective tests that include ArcaVir and NOD32.

Rich