The most recent firewall test from Matousec shows that the latest Comodo Internet Security v4.0 grabs the first place with a perfect 100% score which is pretty impressive. The good thing about Comodo Antivirus is you can use it in commercial environment unlike the free Avast, Avira and AVG which you can only use it on home computers. While I was testing Comodo Antivirus v4.0, the most annoying problem that I encountered was the slow virus database update. Updating Comodo the first time requires to download a 87.5MB base file and a horrible speed of only 5KBps. Through calculation, it would take nearly 5 hours to complete the update and I really don’t have that much of time to spare.
The first thing I did was I fired up URLSnooper to sniff the URL that the base file is located thinking that I could probably manually download the file using a download manager with a few simultaneous connections. I found out that Comodo has 4 update servers, 3 located in the US (eu1.download.comodo.com, us3.download.comodo.com & us4.download.comodo.com) and the other 1 in Europe (eu2.download.comodo.com). Comodo randomly assigns the update server to use and I noticed that I could only achieve full download speed of 160KBps on one of the servers.
You can know which Comodo update mirror is the fastest by manually test downloading the files below. You don’t need to download the whole file, just download and check the full speed that you get and then cancel the download.
EU1 (US Washington): http://eu1.download.comodo.com/av/updates40/sigs/bases/bases.cav EU2 (UK Congleton): http://eu2.download.comodo.com/av/updates40/sigs/bases/bases.cav US3 (US New Jersey): http://us3.download.comodo.com/av/updates40/sigs/bases/bases.cav US4 (US New Jersey): http://us4.download.comodo.com/av/updates40/sigs/bases/bases.cav
You can configure the update server to use in Comodo by opening Comodo, click on More button at the top right of the program and click Settings. Click on Update tab, click the Add button and type in the host for example, http://us4.download.comodo.com/. Make sure you uncheck the default http://download.comodo.com/ and then click OK button. Do note that this is not recommended because if the update server which you manually chosen is down for maintenance, then update would not be possible.
Many people has suggested to Comodo to offer an offline signature database update for the longest time but for some reasons they are not doing it. So it would be nice if Comodo puts more effort in the updater because it doesn’t support resuming of the virus database downloads. If the download failed at 80MB with only 7MB remaining to go, the download will have to start all over again, leaving the user cursing !@#$%^#!. Currently the only way I know to transfer the database from one computer to another is by backing up the “scanners” folder which is located in C:\Program Files\Comodo\, and then copy it to another computer from Safe Mode.