Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus 2013

Last year Webroot took the bold step of completely junking their existing antivirus technology and replacing it with something completely different. The latest edition, Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus 2013, is still under 1 MB in size, but it does even more. In addition to excellent antivirus protection, it includes firewall-style program control, an antiphishing component, and powerful protection for your browser and your secure connections.

If you install a trial version, you'll get an offer of help deciding which product is best. The installer collects answers to a few questions, analyzes your system status, and suggests a product or combination of products. For example, if you have multiple browsers it recommends password management, but if you have very few personal documents stored it figures you don't need a backup solution.

The actual installation of this antivirus takes just seconds, but the installer performs a number of additional tasks. Where the old installer just showed a simple progress bar, the installer for the 2013 edition clearly displays what it's doing. In particular, at install time it analyzes your system and configures the product for best performance.

A high-level collection of settings lets you tweak the product's overall behavior. For example, you can move a slider between "Set and forget" protection and "Hands-on security," or between "Minimal system resource usage and "Fastest scanning." Most users won't need to dig any deeper. In fact, if you do go to change any of the product's advanced settings it gently points out that you really don't need to and offers you a chance to reconsider. Of course, if you do want to continue you're free to change anything you like. For testing, I left the advanced settings alone.

The new main window offers live up-to-the-second statistics such as how long the product has been active, when the next automated scan will occur, and how many files the product is monitoring. It also links to various pages of the advanced settings dialog. It even reports the average CPU usage (0.18 percent on my test system) and disk space usage (0.006 percent). This version is definitely more informative than its predecessor.

It's worth noting that Webroot SecureAnywhere Business offers exactly the same protection for businesses. The IT team will appreciate the way it installs quickly and doesn't require signature updates. The business edition adds full-scale remote management and deployment, with centralized control over security policies.

Fast Install and Scan
As noted, Webroot performs a full system scan as part of the installation process. On my standard clean test system, a full scan took about six minutes. That's vastly less than the current average of 39 minutes. If the scan does detect any threats, Webroot launches another scan after cleanup, to ensure that it caught everything.

The installation problems that plague so many of my malware-removal tests were refreshingly absent this time around. Webroot installed and scanned without any problem on all of my 12 malware-infested test systems. One system lost network connectivity after cleanup; Webroot tech support checked the logs and quickly supplied a script that fixed that problem. I managed to install the product, scan the infested systems, and record the results all in a single day.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/7T9Kv2Fzoko/0,2817,2410545,00.asp

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