The interface of Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal 5.0 is not warm and fuzzy, but when it comes to performance, this product excels.

In "The New Virus Fighters", Kaspersky was the only product among the ten we tested to detect our zoo collection's backdoor programs, bots, and Trojan horses better than 99 percent of the time. And it was the quickest company at responding to new security threats. For the period of eight months in 2005 that we tested, Kaspersky Labs released new signature updates less than 2 hours after it detected a major security threat, on average. Kaspersky ranked fourth in our heuristics tests.

The Kaspersky interface, while clean, isn't especially friendly, offering little explanation of the options and settings. There is a Help link at the bottom of the screen, but the assistance was sparse compared with the other products we reviewed.

Strong heuristics and virus detection, and quick outbreak-response times, more than make up for weaknesses in interface design.

Tony Bradley