Panda Antivirus Titanium review

Verdict:

Review Date: 29 May 2002

Price when reviewed: (£24)

Reviewed By: Simon Edwards

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Friendly, colourful and reassuring, this package is aimed at people who just want to avoid or get rid of viruses without any fuss.

Prevention

Panda performed well in the scanning tests, and managed to find our basic Trojan.

Simply copying an infected file to the hard disk caused the software to kick into action and sound the alarm. It didn't detect our custom Trojan or our malicious script, though, and neither did it detect us editing the hard disk's boot sector.

Because this program has been designed to be very simple to use, there aren't a great many options to play with. Heuristics is always enabled, which may impact on a system's performance, although the price of 1GHz PCs these days makes that problem go away for some people. We didn't notice any lack of oomph in our 500MHz test system.

Ease of use

The lack of options does reflect a package rather light on features. You can scan your system, and the resident scanner will catch viruses as they float onto your hard disk, but that's it. Panda makes a great deal of the update system that works in the background while you use the Internet. This is a useful feature, although we'd like to get a more upfront confirmation that we're up to date with virus definitions.

Our one major complaint is that you need to jump through hoops to scan single files. Doing whole hard disks is fine, but the lack of an option on the context menu means clicking through at least three screens before setting off the scan. If it's too much trouble, you won't bother - rendering the package useless.

Overall

This cheerful little program will keep your PC free of major nasties. If you worry about programs more technical than Windows Notepad, this is for you.

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