Labs

Antivirus Software

Viruses pose a serious threat to every computer user - so we've been pretty ruthless in our testing of these antivirus products. In short, we simulated the virus attack from hell. Each antivirus package was tested using a PC with a brand new installation of Windows XP. We downloaded the latest updates before testing. Then we introduced a collection of well-known viruses on to the test machine to assess the software's ability to combat everyday threats. To further test their mettle, we also created two viruses and modified two others to see if the scanners could detect them. These included macro viruses designed to run in Word and Excel. Finally, we created three Trojans with different characteristics to test the scanners' defences against this type of program, and so-called 'backdoor' hacking tools.

Even the most vigilant antivirus package is useless if it's so frustrating to use that you end up turning it off! That's why we assessed how easy it was to locate and change each program's security settings. We also wanted to make sure the software wouldn't cause an average PC to slow to a crawl when a scan was running in the background. To test this we ran each program on a Pentium III 800 PC with 256MB of memory.