Panda Internet Security 2009

List Price: $0.01

Customer Reviews:

Great protection after a wicked install [Posted on 2008-10-18]
I have been using Panda Internet Security (PIS) for a couple of years now and when the 2009 edition came out I was excited to give it a shot. I got a few unpleasant surprises, and a few good surprises too.

My target system is a Windows XP Home system with 1.25GB RAM. I will eventually try this on a Vista system.

I did some things a little bit differently this time. Having been registered in the past for previous versions, I figured that doing an online upgrade would be the least expensive way to go. This is not at all the case. Buying a CD and installing fresh is appreciably cheaper, in my case saving $30 because I caught this product on sale on Amazon. If you are already registered for an older version, consider just getting the CD instead of buying online, as you likely will save quite a bit of money. Panda is not the only security software vendor who has this pricing scheme, so expect this across the board.

Installation was a rude shock - the auto-installer crashed. I got a debugging window, and if I clicked on either button the installation stopped and I got nothing. To get the auto-installation to work I had to let the auto-install crash and then simply ignore the window (well, I had to move it out of the way). I could also have just explored the CD and run the binary directly. After that, the install proceeded normally.

The install failed in another, more subtle way - after installing from the CD it wanted to reboot the computer, but it did not eject the CD as it should have. As a result, the CD was the boot media and the system came up in rescue mode. This was an aggravation I neither expected nor appreciated. I do not know if this was a problem in previous versions as I always have used downloadable applications, not CDs.

After installation it was time to register, and PIS2009 wanted access to the internet. However, as I am on dial-up, PIS2009 blocked my phone connection as unauthorized and I had to close other dialog boxes before I could even address this issue. On the computer in question, the install was a full-up new install, not an upgrade, so I did not have the benefit of pre-existing settings.

Finally up and running, I decided to make sure the number I use for connecting was set up correctly. When I found the list of permissible numbers, I found some garbage entries in the list that made no sense. I don't know where they came from but I deleted them and all is well. Be sure to look in to this!

All right, let me explain the better things I discovered.

I looked at the process list and found that PIS2009 is still gentle on memory. There are some obvious memory hogs in the list, but the memory they consume is not as bad as I would have thought. In general, I would say that on a Windows XP system the memory usage is about half that of a comparable McAfee setup. This leaves a lot more room for other things to run.

The GUI has received a partial overhaul. The main "control panel" window is vastly superior to that of last year's version and it provides one-click access to just about everything in the suite. When about any option is clicked, the old dialog box from the previous version appears with the same familiar settings. It's all familiar and straightforward to me, though new users likely will find everything they're trying to find with ease. I do like the summary presentation of the system status.

I told the antivirus to scan the system. It took it almost exactly 30 minutes and it chugged through over 300,000 files in that time. Panda still has an amazingly fast antivirus. But new to this version is a common-sense feature that I haven't seen in place before - before initiating a scan, the antivirus attempts to download updates. In my particular case this is not necessary as all of my scans are manual and I only do them after an update, but for the majority of users (high-speed connectivity and scheduled scans) this is a great idea.

From what I can tell, the firewall is relatively unchanged. This is good, because the PIS2008 firewall was excellent. You can trust this firewall to keep your system free of miscreants.

I admit that I have not used the identity protection features of this suite.

Not so excellent is the parental controls module. It still requires setting up accounts and passwords within PIS2009 and then forcing everyone to "log in" when accessing the net. There is no ability to define a default behavior if no log-in occurs. I tried and failed to set up the controls without any special username or password, and it could not be done. I suppose this is useful in a pinch, but for daily family use it is cumbersome.

Registration and activation were painless.

I am still exploring the rest of the suite, but the overall impression I get is that it is a solid and capable system that does not beat your computer into submission. The installation could be a lot smoother, and the parental controls are still more or less useless to me, but the firewall and antivirus more than make up for these issues and overall I would recommend this suite as an excellent solution.

Panda [Posted on 2008-10-31]
After having a difficult time getting it registered, gosh awful tech support, it seems to work ok . .. I guess.

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