I’ve been trialing the new version of NOD32 from ESET for several weeks now (NOD32 v4 Public Beta 1, Build 4.0.68) so here are my impressions on the product.
NOD32 and Kaspersky are my most favorite antivirus applications because they don’t make your computer sluggish and they are good at picking up viruses. The new Norton Antivirus came close too with its Gamer Edition.
Since it’s still on Beta 1, interfaces and features may change.
NOD32 v4 Beta 1 Features
In short, it protects your computer from malware (basically what an antivirus should do). The new version includes new features such as (taken from the Public Beta official page):
- Support for Microsoft Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird mail user agents
- Scanning of SSL-encrypted HTTPS and POP3S traffic
- Integrated SysRescue module for creating bootable discs and USB flash drives
- Integrated SysInspector module for analyzing runnings processes on computer
- Device driver-based cleaning module to remove malware which runs at boot time
- Watch Activity pane graphs File and Network Activity with second, minute or hour precision
- Text mode interface for compatibility with screen-readers and other assistive technologies
Apart from detecting viruses, as you can see above, there are other features built into it as a package. It even detected that I have been naughty and not updating my Windows XP properly as you can see below:
NOD32 v4 Beta 1 User Interface
The interface is quite clean and elegant. The default skin that comes with it is enough and since it’s just an antivirus, you shouldn’t be bothered with trying to re-skin the application. The less you see your antivirus program displayed on your screen (or its warning), the better, right?
There are some summary statistics if you are into that sort of thing built into the product: Number of infected objects, number of clean objects, and so on.
The basic interface and default settings should be enough for most casual users. But if you want to know the itty gritty details of what it’s doing, feel free to go through the Advanced Setup/Settings.
When not opened, the icon will sit nicely on the system tray and provides you a quick access by right clicking on the icon. To disable the antivirus temporarily, you can simply right click on the icon and disable the antivirus (useful if you want to play a game, for example).
NOD32 v4 Performance
As I said earlier, I don’t notice any degradation on my system performance when I have NOD32 version 4 Beta 1 up and running. It eats up around 50 MB of RAM on Windows XP Service Pack 3 (egui.exe and ekrn.exe processes). Performance is quite important on my Windows XP machine since I haven’t reformatted that machine for several years!
As for virus detections, honestly it’s a bit hard for me to test. But I always have this computer that has been infected by a worm (No, not my computer) so I gave it a try. Plugged my USB Flash drive on that machine and plugged it on my machine with NOD32 version 4 Public Beta 1 installed. A few seconds later, I saw this popping up on my screen:
So far so good! NOD32 detected the worm as AutoRun.SN worm and safely removed the infected file (Autorun.inf) created by the worm automatically.
Conclusion
Even on Beta 1, ESET NOD32 version 4 antivirus looks pretty solid. I haven’t encountered any bugs and so far it looks pretty stable with no crashes at all. It also works on the leaked Windows 7 Beta builds so if you are looking for a good antivirus while playing around with your Windows 7 build, take NOD32 v4.
The NOD32 Public Beta page can be accessed here.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I personally love Kaspersky; fairly light weight and easy to use. Though NOD32 is very good as well; the main reason I still use Kaspersky is because of the free licence I got for it by my bank :p
Though the beta does look promising…sideline question…leaked Windows 7 beta? … got a link :p
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Yup, both are the best antivirus out there
I do have a link, but why bother if the public beta is going to be released in a few hours? (it’s meant to be available for public on Friday 9th)
hai …
bagi nod v 4 donk …
hahaha …
riel’z
It’s 4 months later now, and I’m already testing the commercially released NOD32 4.0. I’ve been a Kaspersky user for many years, but lately I’ve been submitting a few suspicious files to Virustotal and found that Kaspersky isn’t what it used to be any more and is missing way too much malware. Since I’m trying Windows 7 RC (in dual-boot with XP, where Kaspersky remains), I thought this could be a chance to try something else. Since NOD32 is so highly praised and works on Windows 7, a trial was more than in order. (Windows 7 is so good and stable, even at this RC stage, that I moan and groan when I have to boot to XP for some reason! I’m LOVING it!)
Well, I didn’t like it so far. Yes, it is light on the system and the detection rate is outstanding – it found a spyware that no other program had, not Kaspersky and not any of many spyware detectors. But I found three serious problems with NOD32. First, too many false alarms, even with heuristics set to medium. It even found a “probably unknown NewHeur_PE virus” in a RAR archive containing only Word and PDF files from 6 years ago that hasn’t been opened in years.
Second, I ran this first full scan with “no cleaning” because I wanted to look at the results first and decide what to do with them later; I was afraid it would delete some vital clean file by mistake. I was expecting to find some easy right-click option in the scan log, so I could either mark the file as safe, disinfect it or delete it, just as Kaspersky does. I found out that I just couldn’t do it. For that, I had to either run another scan with the “standard” or “strict” option on and then work from the quarantine, or get out of the program and use the Explorer interface commands, after manually entering the exceptions one by one.
And third, the log contained *hundreds* of warnings about archives and software setup files that it simply couldn’t parse to extract and scan. Nearly all of them were trivial ZIP and RAR archives or InstallShield executables that Kaspersky never misses.
I also didn’t see anything like the real-time application behaviour analysis that Kaspersky does – it is even more annoying than UAC, but definitely a great added security value. I could perhaps add ThreatFire to do that, but it would be great if NOD32 included that feature.
I’ll be giving NOD32 a couple of days more (not longer, because the trial version doesn’t update the signatures more than once), then I’ll try Avira, but I guess I’ll be back to Kaspersky in the end. I still have almost a full year of its licence left, after all, and I like its features. I may supplement it with occasional Virustotal checks of specific files, and on-line system scans offered by many antivirus vendors (including ESET).
But I’ve explored your blog and loved it, Michael! I intend to be a regular visitor. My compliments!
Such a lengthy comment but thank you very much for sharing your insights here, Goyta.
I’d say that no software is perfect just like saying that nobody’s perfect
On the previous version (can’t remember which one it is now), Kaspersky detected a few more trojans in my computer compared to NOD32. But I wasn’t sure whether it’s real or whether it’s a false alarm. I haven’t tried its latest version so unfortunately I can’t give any comparison to that. However, your comment does add a value to this post so thanks for sharing again