AntiVir AntiVir Personal Edition 6.32

Among the ten products in the test group, AntiVir ranked below average when conducting an on-demand scan, although it performed the best of the free programs. While able to detect more than 90 percent of the threats in our collection of backdoor programs, bots, and Trojan horses, it ranked near the bottom of the pack when it came to detecting unknown threats by using heuristics, catching less than 25 percent of worms and backdoors using one-month-old virus data. AntiVir did perform fairly well in our scan-speed tests, finishing fourth overall.

Missing features, middling performance, and the lack of telephone tech support put AntiVir in seventh place overall . However, the new AntiVir Personal Edition Classic 7, currently in beta, offers a new user interface and a new heuristics engine.

Upshot: AntiVir's free protection is better than no protection at all, though the program's performance and feature set could be better.

Tony Bradley