Trust ez anti virus

CNET editors pick the products and services we write about. When you buy through our links, we may get a commission. March 19, a. Even better, it's the fastest antivirus program we've tested.

However, when you pay less, you also get less. EZ Antivirus lacks many of the niceties of its pricier competitors, such as real-time scanning of incoming and outgoing mail and an integrated firewall to halt no-good hackers from commandeering your PC. Yes, there's a handy Options Wizard that steps you through these basic configuration tasks, but you'll need to comb the menu bar first to find it. One nice addition to EZ Antivirus is a taskbar tray icon that flashes when the program notices antivirus detection problems, such as when a virus attempts to disable your antivirus protection.

To access more details about a given problem, right-click the flashing icon to trigger a pop-up dialog box. In our tests, the icon flashed often, warning us of a problem with the AutoDownload feature, which retrieves updated signature and program files.

The problem later resolved itself, although we never discovered what caused it. EZ Antivirus 's real-time scanner takes a more aggressive approach to virus protection than previous versions. In version 6. EZ Antivirus now cleans the file and any Registry entries that might have been affected. Another noteworthy upgrade concerns compressed files. And while Windows XP SP2 will enable the Microsoft Firewall, it doesn't provide both inbound and outbound protection--you'll still need a third-party firewall.

The Internet-content-creation portion of SysMark measures a desktop's performance running off-the-shelf applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder, and Macromedia Dreamweaver. With EZ Antivirus running, our test system scored a remarkable with no reduction in overall system speed. Or course, these features are standard fare for antivirus software, and we'd like to see eTrust's features beefed up a bit going forward. For instance, EZ Antivirus scans only inbound e-mail, whereas its competitors scan both inbound and outbound messages.

Outbound scanning is useful for blocking worms in outgoing messages. Spyware detection is essential, too--and a firewall.

Our experiences with online chat were favorable. Wait times were a couple of minutes, tops, and the technical-support reps seemed up-to-speed on the features within eTrust EZ Antivirus 7.