Panda Cloud Antivirus

However, the program's design also meant that it could not work with our current method of proactive-protection testing, which requires us to use two- and four-week-old signature databases to simulate how well an antivirus tool performs against new, unknown malware. The same goes for our on-access scan tests, which gauge how much slowdown a program introduces when it scans files that the user copies. Panda uses a multitiered scanning model that only blocks access and does an immediate scan for programs that attempt to run, which it considers the highest risk. Files on a hard drive (preexisting and newly copied) are tagged for background scans only during idle time, to improve performance. (The app checks downloaded files right away, but doesn't block the files before the scan).

On a full on-demand scan, it offered middling speed, coming in fourth (among nine contenders). It was reasonably good at cleaning existing malware, and it detected all ten test infections. But it failed to disable one infection, and it failed to remove Registry entries and other largely harmless junk after every cleanup attempt.

For now, we can't give Panda's app a complete score, but its impressive ability to detect malware makes it well worth keeping an eye on.