The ultimate combination? (NOD32 & KAV)

Well, I see that the rumor of the KAV being a resourse-hog has been spreading like
a rapid wildfire. While this may be true on 'some' systems, it's not a universal truth.
I have tested KAV 4.5 on a very old machine, a tad slow Celeron 400 on a Intel 440ZX
chipset (66MHz system bus anyone?) with 256MB of SDRAM running WinXP, Kerio 2.1.5,
PGP, BOClean and two other active processes. I don't find KAV any slower than 'pick-
your-own' antivirus.

Here is the status of the memory usage of KAV, as I type these lines:
avpcc.exe - 616K
avpcc.exe - 560K
AvpM.exe - 7976K

The system is brutally tweaked for performace, and KAV is no exception. I've set it up
not to check useless and non-active data on some partitions. The temporary internet
directory resides on a different partition, so does the pagefile.

I've tested NOD32, DrWeb, F-Prot, BitDefender, McAfee, Norman and maybe a couple
more antiviruses on this same system. So far, only DrWeb and F-Prot have shown the
lower memory usage for the on-access scanner subsystem. NOD32, on my system,
eats no less than 12MB (for two processes) combined, all the time. Plus, I've had some
bad experience of slow loadings of a few programs while using NOD32 and F-Prot.
DrWeb made my system unstable and rebooted it a few times. I believe that Spider
Guard is still in need to be debugged and developed to be more stable on NT/2K/XP/2K3
platforms.

All in all, Kaspersky has earned my respect and trust. The only other AV I trust in is
McAfee VirusScan 7.x (V8 is a virus itself).

Regards,
AgentX

 

Did you also "tweak" all the other AV's you tried as you did KAV?

 

Sure I did!
F-Prot for Windows has no configurable options for the RTM on NT platform.
SpiderGuard was configured not to scan archive files, with the default "Smart" option.
NOD32 was tweaked as well. And, I'm no Kasperkist. I reported only what I found on
an old system of mine. I've nothing against or in favour of any person(s)/conpanies or
corporations. I'm just a security consicous being who's up to test and decide for
himself, be it antiviruses or firewalls.

I thank this forum for all the nice discussions and biased/unbiased reviews of security
software. I also thank the moderators for keeping this place in good shape, thus
allowing the rest of us to know and keep the ugly face of the Internet away from
selves.

Regards,
AgentX

 

I wasn't trying yo be sarcastic or anything - hope it didn't sound that way; just wondered since you didn't mention in your previous post

 

Not taken down - just not working/available/updated for whatever reason - those scenarios seem much more likely to me. You're vulnerable regardless of mechanism, but you are quite correct - I've never run into things being selectively and actively taken out either, nor would I expect to.

Blue

 

Ah, caught again - I did state that one too strongly - you are quite right, there's absolutely no reason that an AV specific vulnerability would not be exploited it one were uncovered and simple experience suggests they do exist.

Best regards,

Blue

 

Now I am even more curious to try KAV 5.0. NOD32 uses 16,000 K ,or more, memory for the two processes. According to your tests, KAV uses only slightly more and you get so much more with KAV! The only reason I have stayed away from it is that I thought it made all systems extremely draggy.

 

I just want to clarify this thing about KAV users 'tweaking' their settings to get it to run smoother. The reason the default resident monitor brings a system to snail performance is because the monitor is looking deep inside compressed files, archives, self extractors etc. Much more deeper than any other AV does. So some KAV users 'tweak' the settings so it doesn't look so deep. In fact it probably ends up looking only slightly deeper than other AV's if not the same. So KAV users are not less well protected than other AV users, they are just not as protected 'in depth' as they were with the default settings. I'm pretty sure if something like NOD(the current speed king) looked into files with the same depth that KAV does that it would also bring a system to it's knee's. In fact any AV would. Speed is the price you pay if the resident monitoring is looking inside every archive. But this myth of KAV users being less well protected when they 'tweak' their settings is exactly that, a myth...

muf