Product Overview
CA Anti-Virus Plus Anti-Spyware 2010 is a $49.99 Internet protection
suite for home users. It provides anti-virus and anti-spyware protection
and the license is good for up to three computers. CA Anti-Virus is
advertised to be netbook friendly, implying it should be light on
resources. We will find out.
Download & Installation
CA Anti-Virus is a 79MB download. The install is relatively painless
after starting the installer; it takes a few clicks and about five
minutes to install. The wizard is straightforward, though not as slick
or innovative as other products such as
Norton 2010.
Users are prompted to register however it is not required. Before the
install finishes, the software performs a quick scan of the computer;
afterwards, a restart is required to complete the install process. The
majority of antivirus suites have not required a restart, though that is
a trivial item to complain about.
Program Interface
CA takes employs an unconventional interface with their anti-virus
suite. Instead of a traditional 2D layout with tab-based browsing, a 3D
wheel-like interface allows users to easily see and select categories. I
like the concept but this interface is unfortunately serves as little
more than an upsell for the $69.99 Internet Security Suite since only
one of the categories is actually enabled in this standard anti-virus
package. I don't care for this purposeful limitation and found it
annoying, considering that the Anti-Virus suite is a not-so-cheap
$49.99. There are better ways to upsell a product and this is not one of
them.
Clicking
on the My Computer category (the only one that is enabled) brings up
the screen shown at the right. The interface is polished and easy to
look at. The left side shows recent activity, while the right side shows
scan results and allows users to perform new scans. Users
could navigate to other categories at the bottom, if they were available . . .
In Use & Effectiveness
CA Anti-Virus stayed out of the way in common tasks such as word
processing and gaming. We did not notice any apparent performance
decrease, such as lag when opening applications. Updates were performed
in the background automatically.
To test the effectiveness of CA I used several virus files from Eicar.org, an IT security website. Please see the
test description for extensive information on the tests.
CA Anti-Virus blocked the first file from downloading and while it
allowed the others to download, it found two of them immediately. The
other I had to scan for, which it found easily. Overall CA Antivirus
suite is not particularly proactive but performs as expected.
Performance Impact
We evaluate the performance impact and system resource usage of using anti-virus software in three ways:
1. Overall system performance measured before and after installation using PCMark
2. Memory footprint
3. Time it took to perform a full system scan
Our test system is an
HP Pavilion dv5t.
Overall System Performance Impact Measured with PCMark Vantage
The PCMark benchmarks as measured before (left) and after (right) the CA install are shown below.
There is no change before and after - CA indeed has an extremely small footprint, which is good to see.
Memory Footprint
CA Anti-Virus takes up about 68MB of system memory according to the
Task Manager, which is significantly more than other anti-virus suites
we have tested up until this point. While an extra 68MB of memory usage
is unlikely to affect a modern computer's performance, on a netbook with
only 1GB of RAM it might make a small difference.
Time it took to perform a full system scan
This is the kicker of this entire review - the scan time --
five hours and four minutes.
The same computer with the same data is used to test all anti-virus
products here, and the majority of anti-virus suites up until this point
have managed to do it in less than an hour. I actually stopped the
first scan at the three hour mark because I thought something was wrong,
but that was not the case. CA reported it scanned many more objects
than the other anti-virus suites, but we have no way of verifying
whether it was in fact more thorough or not.
Conclusion
CA Anti-Virus 2010 has a very limited value proposition. It provides
basic anti-virus and anti-spyware protection for home users but is not
particularly proactive. Scan times were extraordinarily long. The
software is feature-light next to competitors such as Norton and
Kaspersky
and does not offer anything unique. We like the interface but it is a
blatant upsell for the more-expensive security suite since most sections
are visible but not accessible. Overall while CA Anti-Virus 2010
performs as advertised, it is difficult to recommend.
PROS
- Polished interface
- User-friendly
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