Kaspersky Antivirus 2009 provides comprehensive security and some new features. Kaspersky is one of a number of brands in the Anti-Virus and online security market that is growing in stature due to product improvements. This latest version takes many of the features we’ve seen in earlier editions and sensibly builds on them. KAV 2009 is a powerful package but not one without weakness, and this time its top position is not so convincing.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (Service Pack 2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition (32/64 bit) (Service Pack 2 or higher), Microsoft Windows Vista home basic (32/64 bit), Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (32/64 bit), Microsoft Windows Vista Business (32/64 bit), Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise (32/64 bit), Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (32/64 bit).

Hardware and Software Requirements:

Windows XP: Intel Pentium 800 MHz or higher (or compatible CPU) and 256 MB available RAM
Windows Vista: Intel Pentium 800 MHz 32 bit (x86)/64 bit (x64) or higher (or compatible CPU) and 512 MB available RAM.

Installation:

50 MB free space on the hard drive. CD-ROM (for installation of the program from CD); computer mouse; Internet connection (for product activation); Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher (for downloading updates); Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0. Optimized for mobile PC's with Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology

Technology Includes:

One year subscription to anti-malware updates and free upgrades to new software versions Free technical support (Phone, Live Chat, Email, Knowledge Base)

Installation

The best and fastest way to install Kaspersky Antivirus 2009 is to install it on a “clean PC”, because the registry key entries left by the previous antivirus programs may lead to the software conflicts during the installation. In other words, Kaspersky Antivirus scans the register and stops the installation if the registry values of old security software products are found. Thus, the correspondent software components should be completely removed before a new installation begins. It can be done by using one of the multiple free register cleaners available on the market. Mostly because of this, the installation procedure is this complicated. Besides, multiple reboots are required until the application becomes fully functional. In total, it takes around 15-20 minutes to finish with the installation – not very good result for the leading security software developer.

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Interface

The Kaspersky Interface became simple and clear. It shows the user the most important controls only and hides additional options that allow adjusting the performance and deepness of protection for more experienced users. In fact, the security defaults are good enough to keep your computer fully secured without extra tuning.

Three main colors are used to alert the user about the security issues: red – for the most important problems (usually it confines to update issues), yellow – minor security problems, and green - denotes “everything is fine”. Most problems can be resolved by clicking on the “fix it now” button in the top-right corner.

During our “fight” with last KAV release it became obvious that 'Report' section got really unclear – it is now so difficult to find where you are and what to do next. It’s not clear which process has been granted access and which has been declined. The program doesn’t display report page as soon as the scanning is finished (doesn’t matter whether quick or full scan has been performed) – for some reason it reports nothing. The “reports” and “detected” buttons are located in the bottom-right corner and slightly differ from the green background making them pretty hard to find. Pressing the buttons reveals correspondent details of the scan. Thus, you will never know whether your system is clean or not until you ask for a report. However, when the malicious code is detected antivirus throws out a red pop-up alarm message notifying the user about the threat.

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Features

There are several areas secured by the Kaspersky Antivirus 2009:

• Antimalware – active protection – includes Files and Memory, e-mail and instant messenger, and web-traffic protection;
• System Security - protects the system from key-loggers, Trojans, worms and variety of rootkits;
• Web Protection (antifishing protection), which keeps the user away from fake websites.

Besides, System Security section offers a very useful utility – Security Analyzer; it does system inspection, detecting vulnerable applications and provides a report at the end of the scan with a list of detected problems and recommended actions. This tool resolves essential security issues for the most of active applications and is very useful for inexperienced users and by automatically

KAV 2009 offers a feature called Post Infected System Restore which performs a system restore when a virus or malicious software damages essential system components. However, restoration procedure requires a rescue disk which should be created in advance using the Rescue Disk Creation Wizard or downloaded directly from the developer’s website. The image of the rescue disk available for download from Kaspersky website is intended for XP and Vista restoration from the Linux

Overall Performance and Scanning Speed

In third-party, independent antivirus testing using live viruses, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 scored in the upper ranks, although it was not in the top position. But it is true that in general the software performs much faster than its previous versions (KAV 6.0, KAV 7.0).

Unfortunately, the boot speed of antivirus is still pretty low compared to KAV 2008, even though it boots faster than KAV 7.0/6.0. It takes around 36 seconds for the program to start, providing all security options are on. The speed increases to 24-26 seconds if antifishing and antimalware protection options are disabled.

The quick scan was really quick; it finished scanning before we realized that. If compared to the KAV 7.0 and KAV 2008, it takes 1.5 more for the KAV 2009 to scan a single folder with Microsoft Office files and around 4 min less to inspect a folder with multimedia and compressed files.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 is still among the best security solutions designed for PC protection. It showed excellent results in the tests conducted by leading independent antivirus testing organizations. In the latest test results from AV-Comparatives.org, for on-demand scans Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7 earned an Advanced + (highest) rating, catching 98 percent of all malicious software tested. The top position was shared with Norton Antivirus 2007. Taking into account that the latter product doesn’t have Retrospective/Proactive engine, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7 and his successors have a tangible advantage among Antivirus solutions available on the market. Moreover, Kaspersky produced very few false positives compared with other antivirus applications in the same tests.

There are several more unpleasant moments about KAV 2009 that should be noticed. We discovered that Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 3.0 experience some problems with load time when Kaspersky 2009 is installed. This provoked us to look for the causes of the problem and brought our attention to Anti-fishing and Anti-malware protection modules. When all security options are on the browser load speed decreases to 15-20 seconds (for both, IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0). However, the browsers start working just perfectly when “POP3/SMTP/NMTP/IMAP traffic” and “Anti-fishing” options are disabled. Another way to increase the loading speed of the browsers is to set the performance level for heuristic analysis for “e-mail and IM” to “light scan”. The last option decreases the load time almost by half, which is still not enough.

It seems to us that the main reason for the issue with web-browsers is that KAV 2009 was not taught to work correctly with ASP, ASPX and CGI scripts. We hope that the problem will be fixed soon.

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Customer Support

Traditionally, Kapsersky Antivirus products possess an excellent context-sensitive help system. For example, if you are within the “Protection” security module and choose “Anti-Malware” menu option, clicking the help button (which is in the bottom-left corner) reveals the corresponding “Protection against malware” section within the help file. Thus, you don’t need to spend extra time trying to find the correspondent answer in the help section. Kaspersky also provides voluminous online FAQ and knowledge database for his customers. There are also active user forums with fresh information on how to resolve a particular problem. Finally, you can e-mail or call a toll-free number to obtain FREE professional technical support

Conclusion

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 includes some significant changes to its malicious software engine and new security tools. However, there are a lot of issues that require immediate attention, like the interface and the messaging around the new security tools. Furthermore, the program still requires extra technical knowledge in order to be configured for maximum performance which is not a problem for experienced users but can cause some headache for those who had never encountered the previous products of the Kaspersky Lab.