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 F-Prot Antivirus Review
April 11, 2005 - Part I
by Andrew Cooper
Prologue
The last antivirus program I used irritated me with its endless glitches and reported vulnerabilities. But when I uninstalled it, my computer was left without any virus protection at all, which, of course, is not good. A friend of mine suggested that I try F-Prot antivirus, so I thought I'd give it a try. F-Prot is known for being light on the system and at the same time providing a decent level of protection to its users.
The download package takes up 9 Mbs of HDD space, not a big deal these days. After the program is installed it offers to run the update process to get the latest virus definitions and component updates.
After all updates have been downloaded, the program requires Windows to be restarted—something you have no choice about.
A look at the program
Once the system is restarted, you'll notice two interesting icons on your Windows Tray Bar. One of them is an always-on protection (called F-StopW) and the other is a Scheduler which allows you to schedule regular on-time virus scans.
One thing I didn't like straight away was that from these icons you can't call up the parent application, meaning you have to go to the program's menu and run it from there. Not only that, but the processes started by the program were sometimes quite confusing and sporadic; sometimes they would show up in the processes window even if you'd actually closed the program and all the relevant icons. After everything's been stopped, the system will still accommodate two processes belonging to the F-Prot, totaling 10 megs of stolen RAM.
The main module of the program is called "OnDemand Scanner". From there you can initiate a virus scan on any specific folders or disks you choose.
The interface of the main module is quite solid and clear. The authors of the program seem to have gone out of their way to make it easy for users to select actions they want the program to perform. Three central icons stand out: an information window where you can check the status of your antivirus program, and see the date of its latest virus definitions and other relevant data. A Scan icon, which, as the name implies, lets you select the objects you want an On-Demand antivirus scanner to go through, and a Settings window, where you can make a couple of minor changes to the program's behavior.
The program lacks the option (or at least I haven't found one) to check e-mails for viruses. It also doesn't allow a user to select the depth of heuristics analysis F-Prod uses to evaluate suspicious files that don't have definitions prepared yet. But, all in all, I have to admit that the program really does its main job of finding and disinfecting viruses beautifully.
F-Prot supports the virus check through command-line parameters. That's a rare feature today, but nevertheless quite valuable because it lets you remove viruses even when Windows cannot be loaded- possibly due to a past viral spree. A list of command-line prompts is given in the program's help section, thought it might take some extra effort to find it.
What I really liked was the program's Scheduler. It allows you to schedule future scans and assign specific parameters to them. This is done in a clear and simple manner, and users of any proficiency level will find this feature appealing.
The next section is devoted to testing the program against a bunch of viruses, spyware, Trojans- all that malware that's such a growing threat today, and all potentially extremely dangerous. Along with his recommendation my friend gave me a 1,6 Gbs malware "package" to use in future antivirus reviews. I wanted to keep the original package in its place and tried to make a backup copy of it to another folder (I knew the antivirus would simply delete all the viruses it came across during the scan). But I was cut short when the F-StopW real-time monitoring window kicked in and let me know I'd been denied access to the original folder.
Read next:
Continue to Part II
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