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Stealth Fighters

Today's best antivirus programs are tough on PC parasites but easy on users.

Sean Captain

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How We Tested

Testing was performed by Joe Wells, founder of the WildList Organization International and head of AvTestlab.com.

All the antivirus programs' virus signatures files were downloaded April 20, 2001. We ran on-demand and on-access scans of 352 files infected with 225 viruses and six Trojan horses from the March 2001 WildList--a directory compiled by WildList Organization International of viruses observed to have infected two or more PCs of unwitting users.

All performance tests were conducted on identical 550-MHz Pentium III PCs with 128MB of SDRAM and 10GB hard drives, running Microsoft Windows 98 SE and Office 97 Professional. Each antivirus program was tested at its default settings.

Speed ratings for each product were calculated by averaging the times for three scans of 10,022 files--with the extensions .exe, .com, .bin, .dll, and .ovl--totaling 894MB. We assessed each program's ability to repair virus damage by scanning and repairing 115 Word document files, 112 Word template files, 34 Excel spreadsheets, and a PowerPoint file infected with a variety of macro viruses. We counted a success as being able to open a document in the relevant application with its data intact.

Our unknown-virus testing used 63 samples of 33 viruses added to the April and May editions of the WildList, while the programs were using the virus signatures downloaded on April 20. All programs had their heuristics enabled at the highest level.

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