Panda Titanium Antivirus 2004 review

Panda Titanium Antivirus looks great and has one of the cleanest interfaces we've seen.

On paper its features look exciting too. This latest version has been updated to include a technology called TruPrevent, which claims to 'rapidly block attacks caused by unknown viruses even before your antivirus software has been updated to combat them.'

It may be able to detect unknown threats, but we can only test it with known viruses, and we're sorry to report that while the scanner detected most of the files we subjected it to, it missed one rather important one. This file was a well-publicised Trojan from 2003, which spreads through a file-sharing network and allows an attacker to control the victim's PC remotely over the Internet. Before worrying about unknown viruses, anti-virus software should be able to combat known ones.

Panda's software allowed us to download and run the infected file, which promptly installed and created versions of itself to share with the world, although it couldn't actually spread from our secure test systems. It added itself to the Registry, right underneath an entry for Panda's scanner, so that it would run every time the system started.

Panda's software also missed three of our four harmful scripts. It allowed us to download and run these scripts, which was worrying as they were generated by known virus generation utilities. To get Panda to detect these files we had to enable heuristic scanning - something a lot of users will miss as it's not enabled by default. When we then scanned these files manually, the heuristics engine found them. There's no way you can take the time to scan manually every suspicious file. The real-time and e-mail scanners should have been able to pick these files up.

Titanium is also a relatively expensive bit of software. At around £30 it optimistically rivals F-Secure and Kaspersky's offerings. It's £5 more expensive than the superior VirusScan from McAfee and is the single most expensive product to run after the first year. A good virus scanner should be both effective and easy to use. If you have to dig around in the settings to enable crucial features, novice users in particular run the risk of leaving themselves unprotected and vulnerable to infection. In today's dangerous Internet environment this could be horribly costly. We were disappointed with this version of Panda's anti-virus software, particularly as it fails to live up to some pretty strong claims. Its high price and patchy performance leave a lot to be desired.

Author: Simon Edwards