ESET Smart Security 4 Review Discussion

By Charles P. Jefferies

ESET is one of the better-known names in computer security software. Today we take a look at their flagship consumer protection suite, Smart Security 4. Is it worth its asking price?

Read the full content of this Article: ESET Smart Security 4 Review

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• McAfee Total Protection 2010 Review
• Best Antivirus 2010 Buyers Guide
• ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.2 Review

 

Quite interesting especially that it provides you with the very best security at basically no performance cost. Your test is in line with other reviews done by websites specializing in the security field.

How fast NOD is depends mostly on the type of data that you have- i.e. in my case NOD32 v4 takes 43-45min to scan some 230GB of data. Additionally NOD has always been very good with scanning archives so in some cases it may be even faster than in yours. (note: I have 5400rpm drive, not SSD one)

There's one drawback do the architecture of NOD AV though- while it can use multiple cores and it can assign tasks to different cores it cannot divide one task between multiple cores. That means that it you run a full scan on a Core i5 mobile (which has 4 virtual cores) you end up with NOD using no more than 25% of your CPU. You can set two scans- i.e. one for C:\ and one for D:\ -that makes it use two cores (one core per task) but if both partitions are on the same physical drive it makes the scan take longer anyway.

This is a small drawback though.

 

Thanks for the compliment, downloads. And yes, the data will vary from user to user. About 40GB of the data I scan is high-res pictures, another 30GB is music, and the rest is program files and the OS. I use the same data to test all the security suites.

That's an interesting note about the CPU usage. Some of the AV suites I test definitely use more than one core; it's not something I keep track of though.

ESET makes the least-obtrusive security products around.

 

Great review. I loved Smart Security when I had it, but my license ran out on it and being low on dough I didn't bother to renew.

 

Thanks.

The best way to buy licenses is to go in our a three- or four-pack 2-yr deal. Get a few friends together . . . very economical.

 

True. Another thing about licenses for NOD (I'm talking antivirus now- don't know about Smart Security) is that you buy exactly that- a license for NOD- not for NOD 4 or something.
So you can not only upgrade for free if version 5 hits the market in a month or so- you can also downgrade if you have old computers at home (people used to go back to v 2.7 on ancient hardware) or you have technical difficulties (like it used to happen with v3)
So what you do is you pay them a fee (for a login and password to update servers) and you can use whatever version you choose. At least that was the case when I bought my last license- 10 months ago.

 

IMHO one of the worst AV tool in term of detection and cleaning new virus in the wild.

 

As I tell my friends, LINUX is the best AV.