Perfect Antivirus 2012

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Price: $24.99 Buy From Publisher

Raxco Software, makers of the award-winning PerfectDisk disk defrag and optimization tool, introduced PerfectAntivirus 2012 this year. With the never-ending threat of viruses, malware and spyware posed to all Web users, this utility is a welcome addition to Raxco's tool set for novice users, power users, gamers, photographers and videographers. The security program provides all-round protection from the massive amount of online threats.

The product installation was straightforward and easy, taking just a few minutes. The program can be used as-is after the installation, but there are also many settings to pick and choose from to tailor the product to your unique needs.

In our testing, PerfectAntivirus provided strong testing against viruses, spyware and phishing attempts that came to our system. There are several different types of scan options for the user. The protection provided is non-intrusive, what Raxco refers to as "silent," and we found that it was very effective and indeed non-intrusive. We continued to use our system in a normal manner, going about various tasks, and PerfectAntivirus kept the malware at bay.

PerfectAntivirus checks for missing or outdated security software as well as potentially unsafe system settings and monitors the behavior of system processes to detect new and unknown viruses. A "virtualized browser" blocks web-based threats. And there is a rescue mode to reboot your computer in a trusted environment when performing cleanup and restoration.

PerfectAntivirus was very thorough in protecting our privacy and personal information. We attempted to infiltrate our system to obtain Social Security Numbers that we had stored on the system, but were unable to access that data. Similarly, we found PerfectAntivirus did a nice job of blocking credit card phishing sites. This Antiphishing feature can be easily turned on or off. We also initiated several chats through Microsoft Messenger and Live Chat that were thoroughly encrypted, ensuring our conversations were kept private and safe. PerfectAntivirus' encryption can also be easily turned on or off.

A useful feature we found, in this increasing social online world we live in, was that PerfectAntivirus has the ability to filter Facebook and Twitter links while monitoring your privacy settings. This protects you and your friends from attempts to exploit your trusted relationships. The search advisor provides advance warning of malicious websites in search engine results.

Perfect Antivirus 2012 Screenshots

We found PerfectAntivirus to provide very thorough antivirus protection and very flexible options in how it can protect your system. The Quick Scan was just that – it took less than 60 seconds but still found lots of malware on our system. The Full System Scan did detect more malware, as it went through all of our drives including our archived files. We then set up some custom tasks and performed a Custom Scan which checked for malware on just certain parts of our system. The nice thing about the Custom Scan is that once tasks were set up, they can be quickly invoked. PerfectAntivirus also has a Rescue Mode that can be used when you reboot your PC – this mode removes certain malware that cannot be removed when Windows is running.

There are also different settings that can be used. Aggressive is the most resource intensive, but we found that even in the Aggressive mode, resource usage was not intrusive. There are also less aggressive modes that use very minimal resources. Additional flexibility is provided with the ability to exclude files, folders and extensions.

The antispam component of PerfectAntivirus worked extremely well, leaving just 15% of the spam in our inbox. Even better, the spam filtering had no negative impact on the time taken to retrieve mail messages.

In our tests, PerfectAntivirus slowed boot time just a little, barely noticeable. PerfectAntivirus also has game and laptop modes to further take into consideration what a user is doing to reduce performance impact. Browsing was slowed by about 25%; file moving and copying test was slowed by 20%. The automated Windows Installer test was slowed by 75%, while the zip/unzip test was slowed by 53%.

Considering Raxco is giving away a free copy of PerfectDisk Home Premium with their antivirus, system impact not only negligible - you get the added performance benefits of PerfectDisk, including real-time fragmentation prevention to keep your hard drive running smoothly and efficiently, especially if you do memory-intensive tasks on your PC, such as gaming and photo or video editing.

PerfectAntivirus includes everything you would expect in a top-end security tool, at a reasonable price. The malware detection is especially good, and the antispam and privacy protection are among the best. We think PerfectAntivirus deserves your consideration when reviewing alternatives, and would make an excellent choice for overall protection of your system.

Price: $24.99 Buy From Publisher