Review by Christopher Wanko

I was a long-time Eset user but tempted away by Kaspersky because of its performance in the av-comparatives trials ([…]) After a year of evaluation I can report that I’ve switched back to Eset’s NOD32 products. I was even offered a free one-year license for three PCs, but instead chose to sign up with Eset again. Here’s why.

I have occasion to fix PCs from time to time, and part of that is scrubbing hard drives and such. Kasperksy actually failed to protect my test bench machine from trojan infections on a USB-attached hard drive. I was greatly disappointed; more so, when I downloaded NOD32 and found existing infections on the Kaspersky-protected machine. Unacceptable.

However, that could be forgiven in a greater context, as not every AV product catches all infections. I’ve used Kaspersky, Alwil, McAfee, Norton/Symantec, AVG, Eset, and Microsoft on many machines, and all have blind spots. However, with Kaspersky, you’re also buying network security, and my primary issue with that is it was too complicated to configure properly. I never had solid feedback as to the efficacy or even correctness of my configurations, and I have configured iptables in anger, so this was bizarre. Furthermore, Kaspersky was a major disaster with logon scanning and delays. It was too painful to use.

In the end, even a price of zero would not allow me to continue with the product. I went back to Eset, and now I hardly know it’s there… and that’s exactly what you want from an AV product.

-C