ESET released version 4 of ESET Anivirus (NOD32) and ESET Smart Security yesterday. Actually I wanted to do a review on the version 4 of ESET products but ended up spending nearly 4 hours trying to help a user to solve his computer problems via live support. If you’ve been here long enough, you should know that I am not a big fan of ESET products. Reason is it cannot detect my private trojan using its heuristic detection and it takes quite a lot of memory. The only advantage that I can see from using ESET products are the easy methods of obtaining username and password to update virus signature database.
I’ve only briefly tested the BETA version of ESET v4 but it was also disappointing as I am getting pretty much the same result as in version 3. Today I will bring ESET users some good news because the latest version 4 is pretty impressive and I would actually consider it to be one of my favorite antivirus program. If you already have a valid license, then there is no charge for the upgrade. All you need to do is to download the latest version of NOD32 Antivirus v4 or Smart Security v4 and use your username and password.
There are 2 products from ESET. NOD32 Antivirus v4 has antivirus and antispyware. As for Smart Security v4, it comes with an antivirus, antispyware plus firewall and antispam. Smart Security has more protection and it cost $59.99 compared to NOD32 Antivirus which only cost $39.99 for a year’s subscription.
This is how the latest ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 looks like. The interface didn’t go through a major change, which is good because the old users would still be familiar with it and won’t have problems configuring it.
Here is what’s new on the latest NOD32 Antivirus v4:
Smarter Scanner – ESET NOD32 Antivirus inspects SSL-encrypted communication channels like HTTPS and POP3S and intelligently scans compressed files to find hidden threats other products miss. (Zemana AntiLogger has this feature) Clean and Safe Email – Email scanning for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, and other POP3/IMAP mail clients, ensuring your email is free of viruses and other threats. Removable Media Security – ESET NOD32 Antivirus scans autorun.inf and associated files when the medium is inserted, in addition to scanning any file on any removable device when it is accessed, or during a full-scan of the media. System Tools – ESET SysInspector and ESET SysRescue simplify diagnosing and cleaning of infected systems by allowing deep scans of system processes to find hidden threats, and creating bootable rescue CD/DVD or USB drives to help you repair an infected computer. Self Defense – ESET NOD32 Antivirus has built-in technology to prevent malicious software from corrupting or disabling it, so you can rest assured your system is always protected. Improvements – Numerous speed, security and usability upgrades such as password protection, keyboard shortcuts, popups are hidden when running full screen applications, advanced protection status, and energy sipping battery mode which extends laptop battery life.
Now it’s time for the test. We’ll first check on the memory usage. I’ve installed ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 on Windows XP and Vista. When Windows is fully booted up, I am seeing a pretty high memory usage of 50MB+ (ekrn.exe at 40MB+ and egui.exe at 10MB+). In Windows XP, the memory usage remained the same but in Vista, the memory usage for ekrn.exe and egui.exe slowly drops to a total of 12MB+. I believe this is the smart memory management feature in Vista and not ESET because I noticed that all other process memory usage are dropping as well. As for Windows XP, no matter how long I waited, the memory usage for NOD32 doesn’t drop.
I ran a full scan on my desktop, and it took 30 minutes 11 seconds to scan 201841 files. It also had some false positives by detecting Quick Heal Antivirus installer as a probable Win32/Agent trojan, PLoP as a probably unknown TSR.BOOT virus. The surprising part is ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 manage to detect my private trojan and also ALL 16 BCD private FUD stubs as threats! That is a perfect 100% detection on a supposedly undetectable threat! Thumbs up!
I’ve also tried placing an autorun.inf file associated with a virus in a USB flash drive. Plugged in my computer and ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 immediately prompts that it detected a virus in autorun.inf file and automatically removed it to prevent it from infecting other computers.
My verdict, ESET has improved their detection but the false detection rate has also gone up. It also comes with many new useful features such as Removable Media Security and rescue disk. As for the memory usage, I hope ESET will stop misleading users by stating that they are the fastest and lightest antivirus on their website. It’s NOT. If you want to use it on XP and concerned about the memory usage, you can try Minimem or Cleanmem.