eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005 (6.2)

Performance of eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005 (6.2)

In CNET Labs tests, EZ Antivirus 2005 caused less system performance drag than McAfee VirusScan, Norton AntiVirus, or Trend Micro PC-cillin. However, PC-cillin remains the speed champ, scanning our 1.3GB hard drive faster than any antivirus software product we've tested.

To measure EZ Antivirus 2005's impact on system performance, CNET Labs used BAPCo's SysMark 2002, an industry-standard benchmark. The Internet-content-creation portion of SysMark measures a desktop's performance running off-the-shelf applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder, and Macromedia Dreamweaver. (We did not run the Office Productivity portion of the benchmark because it incorporates McAfee VirusScan 5.13.)

Our test system was a Compaq Evo W4000, running Windows XP Professional, with an Intel P4 2.4GHz processor and 512MB DDR RAM. With EZ Antivirus 2005 running, our test system scored a remarkable 100--with no reduction in overall system speed. By comparison, McAfee scored a 97, or a 3 percent decrease; Norton AntiVirus 2003 scored a 95, a 5 percent reduction. (An Internet-content-creation score of 100 represents the performance of our test system without any extraneous software running.) In a test of scanning speed, EZ Antivirus 2005 took an average of 2.6 minutes to scan a 1.3GB directory, but that couldn't match speed-demon PC-cillin, which averaged 2.4 minutes.

	SysMark 2002 Internet-content-creation score	Normalized score	Percent degradation	Average boot time (sec)	Scan 1.3GB directory, average scan time (min)
Test system	233	100	n/a	38.9	n/a
Computer Associates EZ Antivirus 2005	233	100	0	47	2.56
McAfee VirusScan 8.0	234	101	n/a	48.38	4.75
F-Secure Anti-Virus 2003 for Windows	218	93	93	63	6.64
Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2004	223	96	4	52.72	3.59
Zone Labs ZoneAlarm with Antivirus	221	99	7	55.6	2.44
Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 2004	227	97	6	45	2.48

To determine whether EZ Antivirus effectively blocks viruses, we gauged its performance in tests conducted by independent antivirus laboratories. In Virus Bulletin's tests with live viruses, EZ Antivirus earned the coveted VB 100 percent rating 70 percent of the time in the last 10 Windows tests--a good showing, certainly, but not on a par with Norton AntiVirus, which earned the title on 10 of its last 10 tests.

Previous versions of EZ Antivirus have also been certified by the independent antivirus testing laboratories at West Coast Checkmark, ICSA Labs, and Checkvir.com.

For more details on how we test antivirus apps, see CNET Labs site.