F-Prot v3.16b - REVIEW

Hehe! Nah, I don't think you were being a "poop", Bell. F-PROT's great, although obviously I risk coming across as a shill, so easy for me to say. It's just an AV that's been around a LONG time, and has been consistently excellent for a LONG time, and Frisk hasn't "messed up" a good thing.

One of the things that I personally really like about it--and the reason I try to offer it to people, is that it's super-light, and efficient. We wanted to offer (in our opinion) the best protection for the client's money. That's why we went with products from ESET and Frisk--and believe me, we looked at MANY AV's. But again, that's neither here nor there...

IMO, your computer should be doing other things than worrying about viruses--and having to run an AV--and running one that "bogs", just doesn't cut it w/me.

In addition, our clients tend to use "vintage" PC's in a lot of cases, and I can't in good faith offer them a solution that I feel is going to rob them of processing power when there are alternatives that don't. I've never bought into "Ah, RAM is really cheap, and so is horsepower--I don't care if my AV runs over 20MB in Task Manager!" Call me old-fashioned!

Plus, hell--the price is right!

*shrugs* As of 2005--yeah, I'd probably say it's something that's needed. Although I must say, I've never had to worry about excluding anything on client's machines where we've installed F-PROT. It just does it's thing and stays the heck out of the way. Understand Bell, that I'm not disagreeing with your view of this feature as necessary--just that it hasn't been an issue for us.

I think in a lot of cases, AV companies are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. "You want this feature? Ok, RAM and processing power are affected. You could possibly have conflicts with other processes..." There are so many things to consider.

When you start adding things that--again IMO--are nice to have, but not VITAL--the vendors run the risk of causing more problems than they're solving. Then you really have your customers--ours too--in a highly-elevated state of piss-off.

And nobody wants that!

EDIT: BTW, Technodrome is right on with his comments in this thread. I chuckled when I read them, TD!

 

I totally agree. Manageability/Scalability in a network are liabilities. Lack of incremental updates. No password protection on settings.

I agree also that Frisk is probably hashing these out as we speak.

 

Not that I've seen. Virtually the same on machines we've installed it on. YMMV.

 

Personally I have found F-Prot's background monitor unusable because it lacks this feature. If a file is being written to frequently, then F-Prot's background scanner will keep rescanning it pushing CPU utilisation through the roof - if that file is a logfile (in text format or a database file) then it cannot be executed and therefore cannot harbour a virus. However, I have never been able to get F-Prot to stop checking it (or at least gobbling CPU doing something) regardless of its settings (and Frisk's support were of no help in this matter either).

F-Prot has a long and distinguished history and generous licencing conditions for home users (1 licence can be used on up to 5 PCs), but lacking such basic configuration options does mean that users need to try before buying.

 

LOL And they'll probably be the only ones still offering a DOS scanner too.

 

Peter's experiences are similar to mine. That is, no cpu drain. I believe that F-Prot is able to determine if a file is not executable in short order. Frankly, I don't know just what sort of log file gets written to so fast that it would bog down any AV. When I look at various firewll log files the entries ar usually a few seconds apart, and only about 10 or so, then a break and it starts up again. It is a non issue, but something folks like to make into an issue as f-prot does not have this "feature". It is also why it is so light. Thre is nothing that even comes close to it so far as the memory footprint is concerned. F-prot's detection rates beat all but the best, and are right in the pack with NOD32.

 

Well that really depends on (a) the detail logged by the firewall and (b) the amount of traffic on your system. A firewall logging details on every connection with a moderate amount of network traffic can, in my experience, result in system slowdown to the point of non-response with F-Prot's background scanner running.

A key point to bear in mind here is that the CPU activity will not be shown as being due to F-StopW in Task Manager - instead the CPU activity of affected programs will increase. Disabling/re-enabling F-StopW and seeing what affect this has will confirm whether it is the cause or not.

 

By your saying "nothing even comes close" you imply that you have made dozens & dozens & dozens of tests of other AV programs.

I have an FP license. I also have a DrWeb license. DrWeb uses considerably less memory than FP or NOD or any of the other 3 or 4 AV's I have tried. To wit, here's a screenshot of part of my goodies, including spidey...

 

Bellg-

Actually I have tested bunches of AV's for resource usage and ease of use. I did not get a result with Dr. Web that was nearly as good as what you are getting. What do they say, YMMV. Many resident programs swap out parts of their code. On occasion I have seen some amazing low numbers from AV's not thought of as having a low memory footprint. Five minutes later they are back to normal. F-prot was consistently small.

Due to reports of false alarms causing the deletion of essential OS components, I have been somewhat wary of Dr. Web. There is a warning regarding false positives on wilders.org, although Dr. Web is recommended for expert users there.

In my tests nothing came close to F-Prot's memory footprint. It was the only AV I tested that would run on an old slow 128MB machine without a noticable performance hit. F-Prot can be run as a single service. Updating and scheduled scans may be run from the windows scheduler.

You have definitely illustrated something about the Internet. Never make generalizations without a safety valve, so to speak. There will always be someone out there who got a different result or tried something obscure that you missed. Instead of saying nothing else comes close, I should have said nothing else I have ever tested comes close. Consider my earlier comments to be so revised.

 

FYI: DrWeb32 heuristics has been fine tuned since then. It’s not as sensitive as it used to be and basically produces fewer false positives.

False positives are common problem with any av that uses some sort of heuristics. You got to have some knowledge before you hit the delete button.


tECHNODROME

 

A question to the experts here...
I've been trying F-Prot some longer now, and I like it more every day... But will it be secure enough?
If I look at http://www.av-comparatives.org/ it's results are just ok, not the best but still good... Pls advice me or give me other reviews

 

F-Prot is OK at detection, but not as good as ArcaVir b'coz F-Prot does not have ArcaVir's heuristic capability.. but the price rocks because you get to install it on 5 computers for a single home license!

 

Indeed, I gonna review ArcaVir too, I start with it tomorrow

But till now F-Prot has the best price/peformance in my eyes...

 

I am not running F-prot at the moment but do keep a close eye on Jotti's scanner and am quite suprised how many samples F-prot misses. Also I have noticed on some of the quite big virus oubreaks I have checked there sites and they often seem to take longer to put defs out than other AV Vendors.

I know there are a lot of very satisfied people using it, and I know its light and am sure its better than the 'free' av's but I dont belive its in the same class as Dr Web, Kav, Nod 32 etc.

Just my thoughts which may be completly wrong

Cheers

Jlo

 

Their respond time is not bad at all, and on big threats they are one of the first with updates...

 

Example of a big threat:

 

Hi Style . Hope you are well .? I like Arcavir too . Just not relying on it just yet . Want to see more results . But it seemed smooth and Stormbyte is super .

 

Hi Stylewarz,

Thanks for sharing that. Where did you find the info? Looks interesting.



Cheers

Jlo

 

Russians are very hard workers - dont ever question their work's legitimacy!

 

It's from the Virus Bulletin I post the whole document later on... just have to compress it more

 

Many Thanks.

In fact I just googled and found it at http://www.av-test.org/ where you can download the powerpoint.

Well I stand corrected on the response time

Best Wishes

Jlo

 

Like some people asked for by PM, two screenshots of F-Prot...

1) F-Prot main window, and the updater.

 

2) Here we got the F-Prot scanner in action.

(more screenshots on request)