Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: ESET NOD32 Antivirus

Today is the last day of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. We were able to hand out lots of licenses to popular commercial software programs to our readers. The application for today is ESET NOD32 Antivirus, a antivirus software by the Slovakian company ESET. NOD32 is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit edition for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Installation is pretty straightforward and comes more or less with the usual choices. It is a little bit surprising (positive that is) that no reboot is required after installation. NOD32 will place its icon in the Windows System Tray and the first thing the user should do is to right-click it and select Update from the options provided. This ensures that NOD32 will download the latest virus definitions from a company server.

The interface of NOD32 comes with two display modes. Standard mode is the default mode of the security software which will hide options in the interface from the user. Advanced mode can be enabled to display all options in the interface. One example would be access to logs which is only visible when advanced mode is activated.

One interesting aspect of the interface of NOD32 is the possibility to switch menus while scanning. Most antivirus software applications do not permit this and block any attempts to switch menus during scans.

Antivirus software has to do well both performance- and detection-wise. It is beyond of the scope of this article to evaluate the capabilities of NOD32 but there are a few independent organizations that regularly test security software. NOD32 is usually ranking very well on tests performed by sites like AV-Comparatives or CheckVir. Those tests suggest that NOD32 has a low false positive rate, a good detection rate (both signature and heuristic) and a fast scanning engine.

ESET is proving an online scanner based on the NOD32 antivirus engine on the Internet which is unfortunately only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

We have five licenses for ESET NOD32 Antivirus. If you want one leave a comment and let us know what you use to protect your computer system.