Free Antivirus Software review by Mary Landesman (antivirus.about.com)

For anyone who prefers/interests in free antivirus software.

http://antivirus.about.com/od/antivirussoftwarereviews/a/freeav.htm

 

Wrong technical facts from her. Please ask her how the heck a archive compressed virus forces the AV Scanner to have a completely different signature for detection? This applies for Runtime Packer if you do not have a unpack engine to unpack the executable, BUT NOT FOR ARCHIVES. For example a virus compressed with ZIP and ARJ should have a completely different signature than the uncompressed virus according to her writings? Oh well...

 

The test was performed by av-test.org (Andreas Marx) so I guess the numeric results are valid (although I am skeptical about the ZOO ranking). You're correct though, the author is not qualified for commenting/judging the results.

 

LOL, who are you?

 

I meant the author of the article, not you Happy Bytes.

 

I know, but still who are you?

 

and who are you?

 

I still (actually i never could) don't understand why the **** people don't use two words. These two words are ARCHIVES and PACKERS which are not even close when comparing. Only and really only similarity is data compression.
ARCHIVES are archive containers like ZIP,7z,RAR,ACE etc that can contain ANY kind of files. They are not unpacked in runtime and they are often cached to disk at extraction/view point. You need specialized tools (WinZIP,WinRAR etc) to unpack them.
PACKERS that are also called runtime packers which are exclusively designed for executable files (AsPack,Pe_Compact,UPack etc).
Packers unpack its content at runtime point without any disk intercation (large majority unpack directly in memory, but i'll never say never that there may also be such that use disk in its process).
Packers also don't require any specialized tool to unpack them since they have their on unpacking code along with packed data (pretty similar to SFX archives, though again without disk interaction).

But no, they muck up Archives and Packers in the same basket, confusing users and making everything complicated where it's a very simple thing like comparing apples with bananas.
I'll always stand behind this terminology as the most correct one, no matter what "others" may say. And i'm sure Happy Bytes would agree with me on this one.

And from what i've seen they mentioned archives not packers which are two different things. If you can't unpack ZIP archive with AV, no problem. It will be detected at extraction point anyway. But if you can't unpack runtime packer, well then you have a small problem...

EDIT:
Whats up with AntiVir lately in all tests? Scores worse than avast! in most of the tests but in the end overall score is better. Omg!? I've seen this twice in 1 month!