Panda Security Antivirus, AntiSpyware and AntiSpam
What a cute teddy bear cried Mal, the malware infection on Josie’s computer. “Oh no”, his friend ‘Spy’, the latest in spyware infections exclaimed, it’s not a cute panda bear, that is Panda Security! They were quickly gobbled up! Panda Security is a nicely well rounded suite of security applications for securing your home computer. It is available for download or to have the CDs mailed to you, the software has a free 30 day trial and costs about $50. I downloaded the trial and I am going to share with you my findings. Here goes!
Panda Security is composed of an antivirus program, a firewall, and some miscellaneous security features. The antivirus program is very nice. In my tests, Panda Security Antivirus detected key loggers, viruses, malware, spyware, and browser hijacking programs. The antivirus program itself can be configured to alert you when problems come up by e-mail. Under the same tab as Antivirus you will also find the tools for Anti-spyware, the combination of these two technologies are very powerful. A pitfall of thee-mail scanner though is that it will only work with outlook, so I could not use it with Thunderbird. The Panda Security Firewall is very robust, very secure, but very hard to configure right! It would be a lot easier to work with if it were not composed of so many nested menus. The default configuration is very good and will suite probably 90% of its user base, it is user configurable for things like file transferring programs and bittorrent or games and streaming media. Additional security features include parental controls with password based authentication. Parents will like the web filter which filters out obscene or illicit content from the websites (or blocks them all together). Just an aside, the Panda Security usernames and passwords are not based on your local Windows accounts; they exist solely to serve Panda Security.
Finally, I would like to share with you the wonderful experience with working with Panda Security’s interface and support personnel. The main screen of Panda Security is very easy to work with and shows the status of your security in four areas (Security Protection, Unwanted Content Filters, Optimization and Back Up copies, and updates and subscriptions). Each of these areas has a dedicated purpose and is easy to work with. Panda Security’s online help (the help feature built into the program) was very helpful when I needed help, additionally their human help personnel were well trained and could go off script if needed, that is a selling point in its own way, because I get tired of calling for tech support and being asked to go through a bunch of “steps” which I’m sure only exist to get me to hang up, anyways, I really liked Panda Security and will recommend it later.
