Brightrev

I think people choose antivirus products for the wrong reasons. There’s a constant horserace between antivirus vendors to catch the highest number of viruses, and people buy into this. If you keep your system patched and you’re careful about how you browse the web and which e-mail attachments you open, you’re unlikely to even come across a virus. So what difference does it make if one product catches 100% of viruses and another catches 97%? You aren’t likely to encounter the oddball 3% anyway.

I have simple needs when it comes to antivirus software. It should be stable, reasonably effective and shouldn’t drag down my PC’s performance. According to its Wikipedia article, ESET NOD32 has been around for 15 years and is written in assembly code, which should increase its performance. I chose NOD32 over AVG Free on Ed Bott’s recommendation. Ed mentioned that he had some performance problems with the AVG product, which was enough to warn me off. As I’ll detail later, I’d rather pay for good antivirus than take a chance at this point.

Setup

NOD32 setup was a breeze. The MSI installer is a reasonable 15.7 MB and setup completes in a minute or two, even on my relatively slow Pentium III-M laptop.

Effectiveness

Although I think the relative effectiveness of antivirus products is more about bragging rights than anything else, NOD32 tends to place in the upper tiers of various antivirus tests. I wouldn’t necessarily want the least effective product, but this is otherwise a non-issue.

Interface

There are essentially three different interfaces for the product. The most basic interface consists of five horizontal tabs that are attractive and easy to use. It’s possible to toggle to a slightly more advanced interface that adds a menu and additional options to the basic interface. There is also an expert option that shows all of the program options. Click the image below to view our screenshot gallery.

Performance and stability

Performance was a real key. Was NOD32 going to slow down my PC? The product installs a Windows service and runs a single executable for the program’s interface. The ekrn.exe Windows service uses 17.9 MB of RAM and the egui.exe interface executable only uses 5.5 MB of RAM. The ESET Program Files directory is 21 MB.

Put simply, Windows Vista SP1 performance with NOD32 installed is outstanding. My old antivirus product caused severe performance and stability problems. Removing the old product and installing NOD32 was like buying a new PC. Applications open quickly, multitasking is much smoother and I no longer experience delays accessing the file system. I haven’t experienced a single hiccup, crash or other problem I could attribute to NOD32.

There’s some scuttlebutt on FileForum that NOD32 has problems accessing or copying .EXE files. I tried copying 20 EXE files from the Windows\System32 directory to a temporary folder and they finished copying before Vista’s File Copy dialog box could even open.

In a week and a half of running NOD32, my Vista PC’s reliability index has jumped from 3.04 to 5.53. It’s very, very nice to use a PC that doesn’t lock up every other day.

Price

A single user Home license is $39 per year. I paid $72 for my three user (computer, actually) license. Discounts are given for buying a two year license.

Options

One potential downside to NOD32 is that it does not schedule a weekly system scan by default. I’ve always wondered exactly why we need a scan every week, when the on-access scanner always runs and would presumably catch any viruses at the door. Though I’ve never understood the need for the weekly scan, I set it up anyway. This is one place where NOD32 falls down - the interface for setting up a weekly scan is too complex for a non-technicnal user.

I really appreciate the ability to turn off desktop alerts for the daily definition update. CA’s eTrust constantly interrupted my games by popping up update notifications. I don’t need to see a notification every day. I can mouse over the antivirus icon when I want to know that the product is up to date.

Conclusion

Running NOD32 has been a revelation. Some of the improvement was inevitable given how poorly my previous antivirus application performed. However, multiple tests indicate NOD32 catches as many or more viruses than its competitors. Setup, performance, stability and the program’s interface are all top-notch. I needed a big improvement, and NOD32 provided it. Strongly recommended.

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