ESET Smart Security is a tightly integrated solution designed to protect computers from a range of threats. Built on the award-winning ESET NOD32® Antivirus and its powerful Threat-Sense® engine, ESET Smart Security provides antispyware, anti-spam and customized firewall features. Utilizing Threat-Sense — the industry's most advanced heuristics — the window of vulnerability between virus outbreak and signature update is reduced.

1. Installation and platform requirements

• Processors supported: 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) Intel®, AMD® or 100% compatible

• Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows® 2000, Microsoft Windows XP (32 and 64-bit editions), Microsoft Windows Vista® (32 and 64-bit editions)

• Memory: 35 - 40 MB, on average

• Disk Space (download): 18 MB

• Disk Space (installation): 80 MB

The installation process gives you the option of simply accepting all the program's defaults or allowing some degree of expert option-setting (which always can be done later, too).

However, Smart Securitydoesn't provide you with the choose of components to be installed, all five components represent indivisible Installation package: file antivirus, mail antivirus, web antivirus, firewall and anti-spam protection module. In spite of the fact that unnecessary components could be deactivated later, you are doomed to receive annoying security messages about how unsecure is your system.

During  installation you can choose whether to allow file sharing for local computer in the local network, something the program advertised as being best for wireless connections.

Naturally, the new look is spotted first. It boasts a clean, clear interface that speaks plain English and keeps options simple, and there's an equally clear advanced mode if you want it. It's light, too, adding just one second to boot time and making modest demands on system memory.

2. The main characteristics of a product

The program's protection consists of a real-time file-system and Internet monitor, scans for Microsoft Office documents and Outlook e-mail, and a number of peripheral threat-detection technologies (the "ThreatSense Scanning Engine"). ESET only announces its presence when there's something newsworthy, like the interception of a virus in a user download. Most of the time it runs silently; by default, the virus signature database updates itself quietly in the background without user prompting. The program's tray icon can pop up a notification balloon to tell you that a new set of definitions or program updates have been applied. Scans initiated from a right-click context menu can be run in the foreground or sent to the system tray to run silently in the background.

Unlike its previous version, the mail scanner checks both incoming and outgoing messages and also scans Outlook mail (cleaning and moving any infected messages to their own folder). The mail module also includes a few other options to make handling Outlook e-mail that much easier: e-mail bodies can be converted to plain text by default, and you can elect to have any already-scanned e-mail rescanned by default after a signature update. Sadly, the anti-spam module doesn't give you very detailed control over how messages are classified, but it does intelligently detect mail sent from people in your address book as being good, and also automatically whitelists recipients to whom you reply

Anything downloaded from the Web is automatically scanned. An advanced user also can configure ESET to scan traffic from different Web clients using one of two modes: passive, for higher compatibility; or active, for more effective filtering. I tried both modes and noticed little, if any, difference in speed or behavior. Finally, you can whitelist or blacklist HTTP addresses (i.e., pre-emptively designate given sites as "good" or "bad"), and ESET lets you feed in a plain text file to define those lists rather than just punch them in by hand.

Unfortunately, we were unable to find in Eset Smart Security something that was look like DMON, which means that it scans macros scripts imperceptibly or doesn't scan them at all.

If you've already used the NOD32 products before, ESET Smart Security makes for a good step up to something more comprehensive. And if you haven't used ESET's products before, you're liable to be impressed: the whole suite runs with the same quiet efficiency that NOD32 itself did.

Anti-Stealth protection module is destined to protect your system from rootkits. It resembles the module used in Nod32 ver. 2.7

From now on, on-demand-scanner can operate in the background, thus saving system resources. This option is very useful for those who continue to work with PC during the system scan.