F-Secure Anti-Virus 2013

By Neil J. Rubenking

Some people love getting extras. An antivirus with tons of bonus features like spam filtering and firewall protection makes them utterly happy. Others prefer to focus on the essential task at hand. For that latter group, F-Secure Anti-Virus 2013 ($39.99 direct for three licenses) totally fills the bill. It sticks to cleaning up malware infestations, blocking new malware attacks, and watching for suspicious behavior by as-yet-unknown threats.

At first glance, the product looks almost identical to the 2012 edition. In fact, there have been a lot of changes. F-Secure's designers carefully scrutinized every configuration setting. If the average user would never need a particular setting, they simply removed it. For others, they changed the wording to favor simple language over technical jargon. Given that the vast majority of computer users are not security experts, this change makes a lot of sense.

Easy Install
Recently I've had some real challenges getting antivirus protection installed on my twelve malware-infested test systems. AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2013 and Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2013 were particularly challenging and required a lot of back-and-forth with tech support.

F-Secure installed completely without incident on nine of my test systems. The product wouldn't install in Safe Mode, so for the test system that only works in Safe Mode tech support recommended the new, remodeled Easy Clean tool to clean up the malware that made it impossible to boot into normal Windows.

The new Easy Clean relies on the cloud for signatures, so it's a tiny download. However, it got stuck trying to fix this particular system, so I scanned with F-Secure's Rescue-CD instead. On two systems, malware actively interferes with any connection to known security-vendor websites, which prevented the F-Secure installer from downloading the latest components. Rescue CD also got those two into a state that allowed full installation. Easy!

I should mention that the Rescue CD's text-only user interface is reminiscent of the early IBM PC. It isn't beautiful, but the instructions are easy enough to follow, and it certainly did the job.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/qDdKIBwk38Y/0,2817,2409673,00.asp

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