ViRobot Expert 4.5 By Jay Munro November 25, 2003

• Product: ViRobot Expert 4.5
• Price: $39.95 direct
• Company Info: Global Hauri Inc., 408-232-5463, www.globalhauri.com

Editor Rating:

A newcomer to the U.S. market, South Korea–based Global Hauri has introduced its trilingual ViRobot Expert 4.5, an easy-to-use, flexible antivirus package that will soon include spyware defense. ViRobot is a resource-thrifty scanner that lets you do a full scan quickly while you work. Scheduled scan and update wizards make it easy to keep your PC clean and your antivirus protection up to date. But testing by Email Safety Labs and independent labs (Hauri has garnered only one pass and five fails on the VB 100% awards) reveals that ViRobot's virus detection needs improvement.

Like Norton AntiVirus, ViRobot has a single control panel to view status, scan hard drives, configure options, and perform updates. ViRobot's elegant interface is easy to understand, despite some odd label language, and you can quickly switch from English to Korean or Japanese. ViRobot's tree structure lets you drill down and scan at the whole computer, drive, or folder level. You can right-click on the menus to scan from Windows Explorer, and unlike with other products here, you can turn this off in the configuration.

ViRobot's e-mail support is more detailed than that of any product we reviewed. It's the only program that lets you limit virus scanning to specified e-mail folders—a feature more often found in mail server virus scanners. ViRobot also adds icons in your Outlook (but not Outlook Express) client for scanning, configuration, monitoring, and help.

Though ViRobot aced our performance tests with less than 0.5 percent slowdown, speed isn't everything: It had a hard time detecting some well-known viruses within nonexecutable files, and its history on independent labs testing is less than stellar (see page 126). The company explained that unless a file is in executable form, it isn't really a virus. While that may be true, we'd prefer to see the scanner detect all viral code wherever it lurks, as VirusScan and NAV do. ViRobot also overlooked a backdoor Trojan horse program we inadvertently downloaded and installed during testing. But it performed well at finding and cleaning infected Microsoft Office files.

ViRobot is easy to set up, with flexible configuration, but its default settings were not as protective as McAfee's and Norton's, scanning only Office and executable files with the real-time scanner. By the time you read this, the software will include scanning for spyware and adware, but the feature wasn't ready for us at the time of testing. Though it's still catching up with the rest of the pack on detection and security of default settings, ViRobot is ahead with its clean interface, fast scanning, and low resource use, making it a product to watch.