Panda Cloud Antivirus – Review
Recently Panda Security has released the first “Cloud Based” antivirus software at a very affordable price… It’s free! This product uses new technology called a “Collective Intelligence” Cloud. The unique approach uses information from all machines around the world that are running their software and collects information about threats. It then instantly protects the rest of them when it discovers new threats. This approach is a community based mailware protection lab and it’s an intersting approach along with being very effective. Does it come with a catch? Not really but it’s designed for slower computers or machines that you want to conserve memory on. When PC Magazine tested the software in their labs, Panda Cloud Antivirus did catch 99.4 percent of all threats. That’s really good!
The approach of cloud based virus protection does come with a cost. It doesn’t block file access when you download a program before it scans it. This is because the program scans new files in the background. With this approach, If you download a program and run it right away, you do run the risk of getting infected. A user can also white-list programs that panda has flagged as malicious and run the program. This would allow you to infect yourself. This is a risk for novice computer users or someone that really wants a program but doesn’t understand that they will get infected if they use this feature.
Simple Interface for Panda Cloud Antivirus
It’s also not the fastest antivirus software out there. This may be because of the cloud based technology. If you’re looking for speed, this may not be the one for you. It also failed to disable some infections and it does not clean up all registry entries made by viruses. Harmless junk that was left over from an infection. Excess registry entries can slow down a computer. This product did score very high on it’s impressive ability to detect mailware.
Panda Cloud Antivirus Pros:
- Small and quick install
- Very, Very easy interface
- Faster on slow machines
- Great for gamers because it uses less memory
- Only uses 17MB of memory
- Supports Windows XP and Vista
- It’s FREE!
Panda Cloud Antivirus Cons:
- Still in Beta… But, wasn’t Google for 5+ years?
- Doesn’t clean up well after itself
- Not supported on Windows 7… Yet!
- It’s only an Anti-Virus product.
- Ineffective against rootkits
Conclusion:
For it’s price (Free), it is a really good anti-virus product. But, you only get anti-virus with this one. We really recommend a full featured product that contains Anti-Virus, Firewall, Security, Backup and Restore along with Browser and Email protection. The product that really shines with all these features is Symantec Notron 360. If you are considering trying the cloud based anti-virus software, then at least understand that you will not be fully protecting your computer against all threats. Be careful out there!
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