said by Karnog:
what's your take on NAV 2003, u think it's bloat?
I think all the 2003 products (by Symantec, Kaspersky, and other vendors -- Trend Micro perhaps an exception) are optimized for XP rather than 9X, which is understandable since 9X is being rapidly phased out even by its MS maker. (I still use Win9x on all three of my home boxes: two Win98SE boxes and one Win95C box). I don't think 9X is totally dead but it will probably quickly die when MS ceases support.
Let me take this opportunity to comment on some statements and claims made in this thread. First, I agree with Mele20
that F-Secure is a very good scanner: it uses its own Orion engine, along with F-Prot's and KAV's engine. It has an excellent detection rate, updates often, and F-Secure is often the first to detection of new nasties. Forex they were first to detection of the latest Opasoft variant: »
forum.gladiator-antiviru ··· 6accd2e4But F-Secure may lack some of the niceties of NAV's easy GUI and design. Mele tells me F-Secure's rescue disk procedure is somewhat convoluted (as is NOD32's) compared to NAV and McAfee rescue disks. Also, although I regard F-Secure as a top-notch scanner: so is NAV, as witnessed by its Virus Bulletin test record: »
www.virusbtn.com/ (which is superior to KAV, McAfee, Trend, F-Secure -- only surpassed by NOD32's perfect pass record).
One of NAV's greatest weakness is that it is almost a pure signature scanner: it lacks a strong unpacker like KAV and McAfee have. Therefore when new packed variants of malware appear in the wild, NAV must add new signatures to detect them, whereas scanners with strong unpackers can detect these variants if they are packed by recognized packers (UPX, Teloc, etc). That said however, it is impossible to account for all possible malware packing schemes, and the more types of unpacking included, the more bloated the AV becomes. Forex, Gladiator_AV
says that on an XP box with lots of memory, KAV with all its scanning options enabled can sometimes exhibit dynamic usage of up to 70 megs, which is a terribly lot of ram even these days with lots of installed ram on the newer boxes. NAV by comparison is much lower than this; at least on my Win9x systems, NAV 2002 typically consumes from 4 to 14 megs max (8-10 on the average); I did observe NAV 2003 using as much as 20 megs on my main Win98SE box, but that is an exception I think: more typical is around 11 or 12 megs.
I disagree with Bobb5
in his statement that IM scanning is popular with users and is demanded: I think Symantec probably did this on their own, perhaps to add new features in 2003, since otherwise 2003 isn't terribly different from 2002 (and frankly 2001 is just as good a scanner as 2002/2003 in my opinion). All total, both F-Secure and NAV are excellent in their own ways: both will provide strong AV protection. F-Secure may be a bit pricey, which is perhaps its greatest weakness.
:)
:)