Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal 5.0 review

Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal version is a no-frills product aimed at buyers who want good basic virus protection and prefer to use a separate firewall and anti-spyware.

But although it isn't an anti-spyware product, Kaspersky AntiVirus detected all of the Trojans, diallers and other non-viral malware in our test.

After installation, the software performs a major update, requiring a second restart of the system. It adds a regular weekly scan to the Windows task scheduler and recommends an immediate full scan of the system. This may take several hours. Kaspersky's scanner is the slowest, but it's also the most thorough, finding viruses anywhere you can think of hiding them. It checks inside compressed archives, help files and others. Subsequent scans are quicker, as the scanner stores a 'fingerprint' of each file in an alternate data stream, and only scans them again if they have changed.

The user interface is well thought out and very easy to use, with everything you want clearly visible from the application's opening window. A full system scan is a single-click option. The level of checking can be changed to give extra security or to speed up scanning. All scans use the same settings, but you can set up profiles so that a scheduled scan which runs overnight checks your files more thoroughly than one you might run from the user interface.

Using the recommended settings, both incoming and outgoing e-mail is scanned for viruses. The e-mail scanner doesn't seem to slow incoming mail. It removes any viruses from your messages leaving the body text unchanged apart from a note in the subject header to say it has been disinfected. Infected attachments are cleaned wherever possible. Kaspersky provides no on-the-fly scanning of Internet or peer-to-peer downloads or instant messaging. But these features aren't necessary, as our test viruses were detected when they were saved to the hard disk anyway. Another features point was lost for the lack of a bootable rescue disk. Instead, Kaspersky recommends running the scanner in safe mode.

The benefits of Kaspersky's no-frills approach can be seen when you look at the resource usage. The software uses a third of the memory of its rivals and occupies even less hard disk space. It had no noticeable impact on performance during general use, and program load times were barely affected. Kaspersky Anti-Virus would look better on paper if it had a few more useful features - but it already has everything you need to give your computer unbeatable protection.