Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.3

I use Prevx myself. My license expires in a couple of weeks. I'm trialing Panda right now. Not against drive by downloads though. It does use more RAM than what one would think that a Cloud AV should.

There seems to be some serious contempt for Panda here. That's fine, because hey, we all have likes and dislikes. Some of us have gotten the shaft by a vendor, and that's understandable. I just feel that regardless of what one's feelings on a particular product are, that if one is going to make statements as if they are fact, then one needs to back it up. Because if you don't it undermines your credibility.

These youtube videos can be interesting sometimes, but they're certainly not scientific. I don't do my own testing in VMs. I could, but I've got other stuff to keep me busy. I have to go by reputable testers, reputable word of mouth, and what personal experience that I have with the product. I'm skeptical about this AV a little myself.

 

Fair enough. No more than 10% of the 0-day malware of the daily conducted tests I do were detected. My empirical experiences are what they are. I'll let all who uses PCA experience its performance and make their own judgement towards it. In my case, I'm sure I'll not come crawling back to the cross because I was infected with malware.

Panda claims to be "The first free antivirus from the cloud". Yeah, right. There were several vendors who introduced the cloud system years before Panda did, and free they were/are. Claiming to be lightweighted? Mmmhmm, let's think about it. Look at the installation size. Look at the disk I/O. Look at the signatures downloaded even though it's a 'cloud-based AV'. Panda says; PCA protects you when disconnected from the Internet. How could that be one may wonder? THEY CLAIM TO BE A ANTIVIRUS OF THE CLOUD. If it's a cloud-based AV, it shouldn't have local signatures in the first place. It's all a fraud, that's the conclusion I've come to.

 

I uninstalled it too..back to mse...pca is not light..is sluggish

 

Honesty, I have no contempt for Panda. Pedro and the their forums mods seem like great guys. But unfortunately, I just don't think PCAV is the greatest product at this time.

And as SHADEK mentions, Pandas disk IO is very high. Ram use is very average. And CPU time has not been low in all the times I have trailed the program. I really don't see this cloud program matching it's "light weight" marketing.

 

@shadek, @clocks & @3GUSER, I'm a bit surprised at this agressiveness out of the blue.

Any and every one of your rants apply just the same to any other AV out there (not detecting very recent malware, having an impact on the system, etc.). By definition AV, cloud or not, will not detect 100% of the malware and will have some impact on the PC. The very nature of cloud-based approach is to rely more on reputation and telemetry to prioritize malware which is in circulation within the community, not a bunch of latent non-running malware which exists only in a couple of VMs testing products.

Tests of 10 or 50 recent malwares are not statistically significant to proof anything other than your own lack of knowledge. I can find 10, 50 or 100 recent malwares that PCAV detects and your <choose_your_favourite> AV doesn't, any day of the week.

And what's with the bashing about install size and I/O? What matters is overall performance impact on the system, not some random metric which you happen to stumble across by accident. So what if one product uses more or less private bytes, disk I/O or number of processes? As long as it does its job without impacting performance what is it to you how it does it?

And why don't you talk about the recent independent tests from AV-Comparatives (OnDemand, Retrospective, Performance & Whole-Product) tests, the AV-Test.org Real-World tests, PCSL tests, the c't comparative, the MRG, etc.? Yes some of these are with Panda's CloudAV and some with Panda's AV/IS products, but detection-wise they are extremely similar if not the same.

Everyone's entitled to his/her own opinion, but I don't understand this type of bad-mouthing and senseless bashing just for the hell of it. Not only is it rude but also heavily opinionated. You know what they say about opinions, they're just like a*******, everybody's got one.

 

Sorry if you felt my posts were "aggressive" and out of the blue. Ever since the first beta I have been reporting high resource usage to Panda. How does Panda labs measure impact if not with metrics?

 

Pbust, you've been here long enough to know that the place has more than a few people with egos, bias and "home testers". You should be expecting this sort of thing as a vendor. That being said, some criticisms are honest and those are the ones you should listen to. I've personally used your product in the past and had many FPs, visual bugs and such things. This was the last version, by the way. In my case, I'm just not into the "cloud" idea of anything, so that's another reason I don't use it. Who knows, I may give 1.3 a shot.

 

pbust, do you have a test page for Web Filter set up? I'd like to check it if it's working correctly...

 

Absolutely agreed, take a look at the metrics. But 1 PC alone is not a good sign of a metric. We have millions if users without performance problem. Does it mean that if under 1 PC it has performance issue then it must be all automatically "junk"?

Maybe there's some conflict with another software, configuration, outdated driver, etc. Maybe PCAV has a bug or problem with your specific config which we need to fix. Maybe its a file format that's causing problems,... who knows, but I think we have been and are pretty open both here at wilders as well as over at the PCAV forum to troubleshoot any problems reported by users. If you truly have an interest in getting it fixed we would love to troubleshoot it with you and fix any bug we find.

 

We're making a new build with a fix for the crash as well as a test page. I'll post the download link here shortly.

In the meantime, here are some real-life ones you can check with:
hxxp://rumcash.net/smartdownload.exe
hxxp://rum-gulp.com/~toxicok/wp-content/languages/home.exe
hxxp://rubirol.cn/google/exe.php
hxxp://network3safety.com
hxxp://daniel157.justfree.com/webscr.htm
hxxp://blueopia92.net/xx1/tmp/pdfswf.pdf

 

Cnet is offering free 1 year license for next 48 hours.....see here . Not sure if its been posted yet

 

Isn't the point of the local signatures to protect users when they're disconnected from the internet? Don't forget there are dial-up users still out there. I don't think they are even the full signatures. You're criticising PCAV for this, but be aware that Prevx, which you speak highly of, is introducing a sub-set of signatures to be stored locally in its next version. Even Norton downloads signatures although they're using cloud-based services so the idea isn't all that unusual.

 

Total cloud-based security is a stupid idea to begin with, for the very reasons you just stated. There will be times when a system has no internet access, and, dial-up is sometimes the only choice in very small or rural areas.

 

I enjoyed Panda Cloud Free. It was nice and light here and I rarely encounter malware. I had Free on my wife's netbook because of the lack of resources there. I ended up grabbing two keys, one for my wife's net book, and one for my laptop and I switched over the PCAV on both PC's in my house.

 

I agree, i do not have the bad experience that others hat so those problems can have so many reasons that it is absolutely unfair to say that PCAV v1.3 is a bad program.

Throwing 10 to 15 links at a AV is not a definite test of how good a AV program is as far as i am concerned. I have other things to say about Languys 2 Youtube videos for PCAV v1.3 but i think this is not the place to mention those things.

Many people here use a lot of different software/registry settings and the likes to protect their computer. All of those might influence how well PCAV works on their PC. If you have negative results does not mean others will have the same experience.

If you find a bug then mention it here, but please people stop this bashing of PCAV...in my opinion it is totally unfair.

 

In statistics class you have to have a significant sample to show a correlation. 10-15 random links out of the millions of infections out there is not significant by any means. The more infections you test against the more accurate the detection percentage will get.

 

I thought this was an open discussion forum? It is "unfair" for people to point out what they see as flaws in the program? Some of you are way too sensitive about software, and apparently just want one-sided talk.

 

Wise words clocks...listen to them yourself.

 

RE: TRIALPAY ERROR

I tried the dl link with firefox and opera several times with no luck

The only way it would work was with ie8 on medium security

Hope this helps someone

 

The trialpay link in the url below works fine in FF 3.6.12

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-20021017-58.html

 

@Pbust

Thank you so MUCH for this Pro license I'll give it a try for my new laptop.

Keep your good work

 

Good Evening ! I uninstalled Panda after Google froze...and went back to Avast 5.0.677...none the less I applaud Pedro and Panda for their generosity. I was somewhat leery of the Tool Bar and all the apps within the toolbar...and felt they probably consumed a fair bit of Ram...I believe in a more conventional setup with less clutter. But it will improve with time...and the dedication...and intelligence of Team Panda. Sincerely...Securon

 

The toolbar did give me problem as it crashed when I launched IE. But after 2 reboots it was all OK.

Now I have uninstalled the toolbar and kept only the AntiPhishing component. So far so good... alongwith Trend Micro Browser Guard 2010

 

What does much faster mean? Immediate? 3 seconds later?

 

Behavioral analysis and Behavior blocker is making my pc super slow, programs have been slow to start.