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NOD32 Antivirus, ESET's flagship product, consistently achieves the highest accolades in all types of comparative testing and was named “Best Antivirus” product by AV-Comparatives for 2006 and 2007, beating out similar solutions from McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky, Trend-Micro, and all the rest.
Protect your system with the best
ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 installed in roughly a minute and a half, and needed no reboot of windows to get started. It was a very quick and straight-forward installation process; the default options are fine for most users. We recommend turning on the detection of potentially unwanted programs for additional protection. Naturally, if you have another antivirus program on your computer you will want to manually run the correct uninstaller first.
NOD32's user-interface is very clean and simple looking, but at the same time, very effective. The program comes defaulted to Standard Mode which is adequate for most users. In Standard Mode the options are limited but the antivirus program runs fine. We have found that this works well for novice users who just want an anti-virus that runs without any hassle.
For advanced users NOD32 has an Advanced Mode that gives the user much more control over the software with the many more options made available. NOD32's options are well thought out and give you more control over the program than any other antivirus program we've tested in a long time.
If there is one bad thing that we have found about NOD32’s setup, it is that no schedule for full systems scans is set up by default. Real-time and startup scans are enabled, but the user has to enter the tools option under advanced mode to schedule full system scans.
Eset's ThreatSense technology gives you protection against new undefined viruses before they can be analyzed. This version of heuristics is highly advanced, perhaps beyond any that we have tested. This gives you Zero-Day protection against new viruses and other malware.
ESET NOD32 4 has both a Smart Scan as well as a Custom Scan option. On our test computer NOD32’s Smart Scan took about two hours to scan all local hard-drives and disks. The Smart Scan was rather slow when compared to some of the other popular anti-virus programs. In some cases it took more than double the time. The amount of system resources used during this full scan was slightly less than usual, making the system very usable during the scan. Also, the startup scans that one every time you log in and every time a new update is received are virtually unnoticeable.
Speed and small-footprint are key when deciding on an anti-virus, but the biggest determining factor needs to be CAN IT FIND AND REMOVE THREATS!!! In our testing NOD32's virus scanner found and removed 3 virus infections that several other antivirus programs missed, on a test computer which we thought was virus-free. Due to this interesting find, ESET's virus database definitely impressed us.
To get a good look into ESET NOD32's overall performance we took a look at a recent study done by PassMark that compared 11 leading Antivirus programs (PassMark specializes in testing Windows environments with its specialized testing-software and hardware). PassMark used 17 different speed metrics, ranked the programs in each test, and assigned points for the rankings. Here is the overall rankings of the Anti-Virus speed test.
| ESET Nod32 Antivirus 3.0 | 137 |
| Norton Antivirus 2009 | 131 |
| Avira AntiVir AV 8 | 127 |
| Avast! Antivirus 4.8 | 113 |
| Sunbelt VIPRE AV and AS | 113 |
| AVG AV and AS 2008 | 102 |
| Kaspersky Antivirus 2009 | 97 |
| RisingSecurity Antivirus | 94 |
| G-Data Antivirus 2009 | 91 |
| Trend Micro Antivirus 2009 | 63 |
| McAfee VirusScanPlus 2009 Plus | 54 |
| Best Possible Score | 187 |
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In conclusion, we feel that ESET Nod32 Anti-Virus scores very highly in all three of the categories that most of our customers ask about when it comes to virus Protection
To us this is the most important category. If an anti-virus isn’t protecting you, then why have it? No anti-virus is perfect, it is simply impossible for any program to protect against all types of infection, so we feel that a score of 5 out of 5 is unreachable. 4.5 out of 5
If all things are equal pick the anti-virus that eats fewer resources. If an anti-virus is going to hog all of your systems resources, how are you going to do the things you want to do? Based on our testing, and the independent testing done by PassMark we have to give Nod32 a 5 out of 5
It is hard for any paid anti-virus to score real high in this category with all the free options out there. But when compared to many other large competitors and retail stores, ESET Nod32 holds up very well (especially the two year licenses). At less than $60 for two years we give Nod32 a 4 out of 5
Overall Score – 4.5 out of 5