Hi,
I have now had a chance to look at the ‘eScan antivirus toolkit from Micro World. The version that I downloaded was 1.0.6.1 with a virus database of 1 August 2003. It comes as a self-extracting zip file that loads the application into the Windows Temp directory. A pop-up screen appears that lets you adjust the scan parameters, and run it. The file is 3.6Mb and unpacks to around 6Mb.

The first thing that struck me is that it is re-packaged Kaspersky, so the size of the team supporting it at the Indian re-seller is not that important.

It is an emergency tool to scan and clean viruses, as opposed to being a trial or “free” edition of a full AV package. The full package is around 17Mb. As such, it is not updatable and should NOT be considered a substitue for a full AV offering. To update it you have to download the whole toolkit again.

I tested it on a PII/266Mhz with 128Mb RAM and two 5400rpm hard drives booting Windows Me. It took 2 hours and 15 minutes to scan 30,000 files, total size around 5Gb. AVG (Grisoft) took 23 minutes to perform the same task.

‘eScan reported 13 viruses and 2 errors. 12 of the “viruses” were .exe files that run animations, it said that they were “tagged as not a virus”. One was reported as “traces of VBS.Redlof” I have no knowledge of ever having had this virus!, (although the box is second hand). AVG did not spot this either.

One of the “errors” was an executable file that it apparently “did not understand”, the other was a graphic file (.jpg) called “error” that is a message pop up for an application!

Ordinarily I would not be too concerned about this, but as it cleans or deletes without asking you, I would not feel very comfortable using it.

I checked the log and noticed that it has a very strange method of scanning, jumping from folder to folder and even DRIVE to DRIVE!…………this would explain why it took so long on a low spec. box.

My conclusion is that it probably works just fine………but not for me!……………I would prefer a full trial version of an AV or one of the online scanners that many of the big boys provide (eg. PC-cillin, Panda etc.) My reasons are:

1. Lack of control.
2. False positives.
3. Amount of time it takes.



Cheers

BTW I have looked around the company website and they seem OK. I think that they are security solution providers/consultants re-sellers, rather than original product providers.