Thread: PC Tools Antivirus Free Edition

Tools Antivirus Free Edition does a remarkably poor job of keeping a PC safe, largely because it holds to a nowarchaic distinction between spyware and other forms of malware.

In an age when a single baddie might spread like a worm, steal passwords like spyware, and allow backdoor-style remote control of an infected PC, most security vendors recognize that labels such as "Trojan horse" or "spyware" are secondary to the idea of keeping everything bad off PCs. Hence today's use of malware as a catch-all term.

However, PC Tools says that its free program will not detect what it deems spyware (a critical point not emphasized on the company's Web site). And that limitation may account for its awful detection and blocking results:

The app left the door wide open for about half of the malware in our tests. And while the app purports to protect against Trojan horses, a common malware type, it detected only 46 percent of such software in AV-Test.org tests. It did better in detecting worms, but its catch rate of 83 percent for the selfspreading malware still didn't compare with the detection results we saw from Avira, the overall leader of the group.

Unsurprisingly, the poor performance carried over to heuristic tests, which use two- and four-week-old signatures to simulate how an app will handle new and unknown malware. PC Tools Antivirus came in last, with results of 33 percent and 36 percent. It was fine in detecting and removing existing infections, missing only one out of ten-but most of the tested apps got them all.

While the program installs smoothly and looks relatively good, it doesn't schedule a scan by default, nor does it automatically update. The software will notify you once a day (by default) if an update is available, but to make it do the updating by itself, you will need to turn on the Smart Update feature.

In short, there's no reason to choose PC Tools Antivirus when other free apps can truly keep your PC safe. Fortunately, the company's behavior-based Threatfire supplemental utility (see page 86) is as good as its Antivirus is bad.