F-Secure Antivirus Review

F-Secure Antivirus Personal Edition

This program is available directly from the vendor.

Vendor's antivirus software homepage:
http://www.f-secure.com

Pros - F-Secure Antivirus:

Excellent virus detection
Support for all archive formats
Uses three different virus scanning engines
You can create and switch between multiple security profiles
When a virus is found F-Secure Antivirus launches a disinfect wizard instead of just a warning message
Quickly updates virus definition files when a new virus is found
Network features included
DOS-scanner included

Cons - F-Secure Antivirus:

Includes a half-decent firewall. NOTE: You're recommended to remove any third party firewalls you have installed prior to installing F-Secure Antivirus!
Puts two icons in your system tray, one which is unnecessary
No inline disinfection reports, you need a browser to view reports
No options to manage virus definition updates manually
Scheduled scans not available
To complete the registration process you need an internet connection to validate your registration key
Slow
Expensive

Major flaws - F-Secure Antivirus:

Requires to much RAM
No support for email scanning (however, F-Secure Antivirus scans email storing files, including PST and OST files used by Outlook. It's unknown exactly which email storing formats F-Secure Antivirus are supporting)
When a virus is found, F-Secure Antivirus sometimes fail to delete the virus or its registry settings

Email clients supported - F-Secure Antivirus:

None

Screenshots - F-Secure Antivirus

Click on screenshot for full-sized image.

Review - F-Secure AntiVirus

The guys over at F-Secure are taking their job seriously. F-Secure's virus detection rate is only matched by Kaspersky and McAfee, and as Kaspersky this program supports all common archive formats. Similar protection is provided in detecting new and unknown viruses, heuristic scanning, having a 40-50% detection rate, something which is very good.

F-Secure is offering daily updates of new virus definition files, and updates are carried out automatically. With F-Secure Antivirus you can also create and manage multiple security profiles, a feature some users will appreciate.

Where F-Secure Antivirus looses out is in lack of some features, and the software design itself. You get no email support in the Personal Edition (scanning of incoming emails is supported in the Workstation edition) and there is no support for scanning network drives.

But what really puts us off is the huge amount of memory needed to run F-Secure Antivirus. The vendor recommends 256 MB RAM on Windows 2000/XP-based systems, which is unsurpassed amongst antivirus software. This means you should have a fast CPU and at least 768 MB RAM installed.

Like some other good antivirus programs F-Secure Antivirus is not as easy to use as it could be. Several task should have been streamlined prior to the release.

F-Secure Antivirus is one of the most expensive antivirus programs. We admit that the $69 tag is a small price to pay for such excellent virus protection, but Kaspersky still offers better protection for less money.

We are not ready to recommend F-Secure Antivirus yet, mainly due to the huge amount of RAM required and lack of email support, but we are close. We look forward to the next major release of this program.

Details - F-Secure AntiVirus

Other reviews - F-Secure AntiVirus

CNET
Editors rating: 7 out of 10
Users rating: 6 out of 10
April, 2002

With antivirus apps, there's always a fine line between elegant simplicity and a frustrating lack of features. F-Secure Antivirus Personal Edition tends toward the latter, offering a robust virus-detection engine but lacking the e-mail interception and scheduling features required to make this an outstanding virus-killing product.
http://www.cnet.com/software/ 0-806174-1205-9055365.html?tag=dir-rev