Final comparison|| NOD32 Vs KAV

Hey Technodrome/admin and fellow Wilder's,

I am seeking your guys opinions on my selection of these two AV's.
I have used both, and I am sort of leaning towards KAV.

BUT, i would like your opinions on whether KAV's failure to receive as many awards (Vbulletin) as NOD32 has, means that it is a worse virus scanner?

Anyone think that KAV still provides the most powerful solution for detecting and disinfecting virii and esp. trojans?

Please fill me in on your beliefs and opinions, as I am going to buy one of the two really soon..

 

Re:Final comparison|| NOD32 Vs KAV

Hey fpm, When I did research on what AV to buy, I too ended up with those two finalists. For me I had to choose NOD32 because KAV wouldn't work on a w2k server without buying the expensive version (like $700 or so)

I was happy with nod32 the whole time I used it. I did have a powerful AT and AW so I didn't worry about the trojan detection differences. NOD32 caught all the trojans that I saw personally (but that wasn't many)

My recommendation is NOD32 if you have a strong AT, KAV is you have no intention of buying an AT.

 

My money goes to KAV. To me KAV is the winner. VB is only one test, don't get confused with that. If Kaspersky Labs people really care about VB they would win every award (it’s sure nice to win but…).You need to subscribe to VB magazine to see details for a specific product. Otherwise is hard to tell! Beside KAV scores sky high everyway else (including ITW detection).
In respect to ITW viruses they are focusing on Trojans, backdoors, zoo viruses,Script viruses etc. This makes KAV the best Trojan and Backdoor scanner so far. KAV is updated daily but that’s not all, KAV code analyzer is so powerful that unknown viruses are detectable and danger-free.

NOD32 is good AV scanner! KAV is better!
I would go with KAV if it was for me....


Technodrome

 

I use KAV. I still find it the best av solution available. No program is perfect but with all pro and cons KAV is IMHO the better choice. If you have the money buy both programs and use one of it as on demand scanner. So you have the advantages of both programs.

wizard

 

For me, like Unicron, it came down to those two and I chose NOD32. IMHO (very humble-I'm no expert) , it is the best as a pure AV scanner...I already had strong AT protection. The main things that did it for me (in addition to excellent detection rates and strong heuristics), was its faster scanning speed and it being lighter on resources than KAV.

 

I don't think anyone would claim NOD32 is better at catching trojans, so the strong AT is nescessary. But for those who have a good AT, KAV might be a bit redundant. Speed is important too.

 

But KAV is just one program running in the background. With NOD32 and for example TDS-3 in the background the system also slows down. But this is an endless discussion as both KAV and NOD32 are very good products.

wizard

 

Re:Final comparison|| NOD32 Vs KAV

Hi Wizard, I am not saying that the combined TDS-3 and NOD32 take less resources than KAV!

Just that for people that already have a good AT, KAV's AT capabilites might not be needed, and that NOD32 scans way faster so NOD32 might be a better choice if the AT capabilities of the AV are not needed. Also, if a dedicated anti-worm program is present as well, then the AV is not needed for that either.

It really depends on a person's set up, and how they wish to combat evil. Some firewalls do a bunch of ad blocking as well as regular firewall stuff, while I prefer a firewall to do only firewall things and would rather employ other progs for that. I like "one prog per job". Other would rather have one thing do it all. I found those apps that do "everything" seldom do everything well.

KAV might be the best standalone AV on the market, but if it doesn't have to stand alone, it might not be the best for a particular person.

That's what makes all these choices so great to have.

PS I will be testing KAV and NOD32 for linux soon. It ought to be interesting.

 

I use NOD32 and ANTS 3.0 professional alpha 3 at the moment ). No problems.

I decided to use NOD32 instead of KAV cause:

I doesn't need a powerfull backdoor/trojan detection (ANTS 3 allready has it ;o) ).
I use windows xp and KAV hast several problems with XP.
NOD32 is about 3 times faster than KAV.
NOD32 has the much stronger heuristic abbilities.

 

Andreas - No fair! You get to play with ANTS 3.0 professional alpha 3 and we don't!!!!

I'm very glad to hear that ANTS doesn't conflict with NOD32. Do you have to disable NOD to run full scans with ANTS? Or vice versa?

How's resource usage looking on the new ANTS? Pete

 

>I'm very glad to hear that ANTS doesn't conflict with NOD32.

It doesn't conflict with KAV, TDS, BOClean, Norton, McAfee, IKARUS, AntiVir and AVG, too ;o).

>Do you have to disable NOD to run full scans with ANTS? Or vice versa?

Yes and no. To improve scanspeed its better to deactivate NOD32 if you scan with ANTS. Its not neccassary to deactive ANTS if you want to scan with NOD32. Just put a rule into your ruleset that NOD32 should not be watched or is allowed to do everything. There will be no loose of performance.

>How's resource usage looking on the new ANTS?

Ok - a few facts of my system (PIII 866, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP):

To scan my full disk (about 70 GB of data and 700.000 files) ANTS takes about 52 minutes with heuristics disabled. With heuristic enabled it takes about 2 hours.

If i activate the ANTS 3.0 system firewall the system will be slower about 1 or 2 percent. I think its ok. But this depends on your ruleset. If you log all "traffic" of your whole registry and harddisk for example your system will be very slow. If you only use the standard ruleset the slow down should be nearly 0.

A few comaprisons:

Start Outlook XP without ANTS system firewall: 3,54 seconds
Start Outlook XP with ANTS system firewall and OnAccess Scanning on: 3,56 seconds
Start Outlook XP with ANTS system firewall and OnAccess Scanning off: 3,54 seconds

Start TDS-3 without ANTS system firewall: 2,1 seconds
Start TDS-3 with ANTS system firewall and OnAccess Scanning on: 3,3 seconds (cause of unpacking)
Start TDS-3 XP with ANTS system firewall and OnAccess Scanning off: 2,12 seconds

System Start without activating ANTS: 23 seconds
System Start with activating ANTS: 23 seconds
System Start with activating ANTS and process memory scan: 25 seconds

I think you won't feel a slowdown only when the OnAccess Scanning is on and the file is packed with a runtime crypter or packer (like TDS with ASPack). Than ANTS needs a little bit more time to unpack/decrypt the file and than scanning it.

 

Any conflicts with the "mother of all OS's" - WinMe? Pete

 

At the moment, yes. I said Windows 9x (95, 98, 98 SE, 98 ME)