Panda AntiVirus Scanning and Disinfection Ben Durbin
Scanning and Disinfection
As mentioned earlier, Panda's quickness in scanning is great but does it do a good job in scanning and disinfecting the virus? That is what we'll find out in our next test.
Test 3: Disinfection
Let's give a little information first.
Panda's virus list contains about 25,000 different viruses. Panda's updating abilities keep you pretty much up-to-date with all the new viruses. But we'll talk more about that later in this review. Where Panda falls short is that other anti-virus programs, such as Norton Antivirus and McAfee VirusScan, have around 42,000 viruses in their lists.
When disinfecting a virus there are seven different actions that you may take. You can: show info on the virus, ignore and continue scanning (?), disinfect automatically, rename the infected file, delete the infected file, move the infected file, or have the program ask you which of the previous six actions to take.
Even though all of the above might sound good, we ran into problems here. When attempting to disinfect a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, it blew away all macros instead of dealing with the infected ones. This of course, still does the job of getting rid of the virus, but most people would like to keep their macros intact.
All in all, it does pass this test but it isn't quite up to par with other antiviral programs yet. This aspect of the program will be interesting to look at in future versions to see if all of the problems pan out.
