ESET Smart Security 4 Home Edition review

ESET's Smart Security 4 is a simple, elegant and lightweight security suite. It combines virus and spyware protection with a firewall, POP3 email scanning and spam filtering. Although it's not as feature-packed as the suites from McAfee and Symantec, its simple interface makes it a popular choice for users who want protection without wading through unwanted extras.

When you connect to a network for the first time, the firewall asks you to choose between strict protection, rendering your PC invisible to the rest of an unsecure public network, and a visible mode, which allows other computers to see your shared folders. The latter is more suitable for a home network.

ESET's main interface has Standard and Advanced modes, both of which are easy to use. In Standard mode, you can run scans and updates and temporarily disable the firewall or antivirus modules, but most configuration options are available from the Advanced menu. Here you can tweak the firewall rules and virus protection to your heart's content. However, the default settings are fine for all but the most heavily protected system.

Smart Security's impact on system performance was minimal. In-depth scanning was fairly quick, with a low resource load for most of its duration. We were also impressed by the firewall, which didn't interfere with the way we ran our usual software. Live protection against web threats was strong, although not the best we've seen; it defended against 15 out of 20 threats at the point of infection. However, our system was compromised only once, as ESET generally located and removed key malicious files, leaving behind only non-functional remnants of the infection. It achieved a perfect score in our false positive tests, too.

Unfortunately, at £48, Smart Security 4 Home Edition is expensive compared to many anti-malware suites that were just as effective at protecting the test PCs. If you need to protect only one PC, a single-user licence is a slightly more affordable £39. Symantec Norton Internet Security 2010 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 are better value, though.

See page 2 for benchmark results.