14 DAY TRIAL // After a period of hard work from both hardcore beta-testers and the Panda Security division shaping out the new generation of antivirus of the company, the third beta of Panda Cloud Antivirus is out and ready to protect your system. The application targets home users and strives to offer the best protection with a minimum effort from the user and little impact on system resources.
The main feature of this intermediary build is that it integrates perfectly in Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit), but it also brings a new set of fixes and improvements. Performance-wise, the antivirus no longer pops the Internet connectivity message and reduced system resource usage during scans.
The interface has not been left untouched and now you have different scan types available (full scan, which used to get stuck at a certain percentage, has been replaced by a quick scan, which checks the malware-magnet areas of the system). The functionality has been improved a lot, although the main lines have been preserved.
However, despite all the improvements and fixes applied, there are still some problems. During our testing we noticed that a very small amount of the detected and neutralized items were displayed in the Recycle Bin. If you want to view the full list of malware discovered by Panda Cloud Antivirus, it can be found in the “Action history” panel that allows you to restore the desired items; it'll take them to the “LostFound” folder in Panda Cloud Antivirus' installation folder (this happens when restoration to the original location, e.g. archives, fails). Mind that restoring an item will be automatically placed in the program's exclusion list and will not be picked up at later scans. Also, there is no possibility to take it out of the exclusion list, so particular attention should be paid when proceeding.
While scanning is fast, our tests showed that the process was not resource-intensive. We used a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM test computer and the results recorded included processor usage of up to 92%, but the average was around 50% and lower. The issues occur at scanning larger folders when you try to pause or stop the operation. It happened more than once for the app to continue the procedure despite our pressing the “Pause” or “Stop” button and conform only after a little while, or even finish what it started.
Scanning is the part to which we dedicated most of our testing as it is the backbone of every antivirus out there. While evaluating this feature of the product, we noticed that there were times when it did not alert the user of an intrusion at all, once they downloaded malicious code to their PC, but upon scanning the file, it would end with detecting an infection. In the previous version this would have been picked up by a background scan, but in the current edition this is no longer the case.
At the current stage, Panda Cloud Antivirus cannot neutralize all the baddies it encounters, and the ones escaping its cleaning abilities are displayed in a different list, accessible to the user. It includes details on the patch of each detected piece of malware, and a notification to see the developer's recommended solution, which unfortunately links to the Help file of the program. This will be fixed by the time of the final version, but needed to be mentioned in case you decided to use the antivirus earlier and wanted to clean your computer of all detected pieces of malware.
The background scan used to be a problem in the past, and a patch circulated among Cloud Antivirus users. Well, with the third beta out, you no longer need that patch as the background scan will be performed only once, upon the installation of the software, to check on the system's infection status; after that it will provide you real-time protection, so repeated system scans would be redundant.
The third beta of Panda Cloud Antivirus sure isn't far from entering the final stage of development, yet there are still some issues that capture the developer's full attention. We had our share of trouble, but overall enjoyed faster scans with less load on system resources and no Internet-connectivity problems.
Despite all aspects that need to be revised, Panda Cloud Antivirus stands firm when it comes to detection and can easily root out malware, making for one of the best antivirus products for home users on the market. Judging by the way the developing team addresses the problems and keeps tabs on the user-reported bugs the application should receive nothing but relish from the audience.
The Good
It is easy to use and you won't even feel it running, now that the background-scan trouble has been removed.
The Bad In order to appreciate the detection power of the application you will have to create a Panda Cloud Antivirus account. But, if this is one account too many for you, a throw-away email address can be used, so this is not so bad, after all.
The rest of the issues are to be fixed for the final version, so they have no place in this category at the moment.
The Truth
NOTE: Panda Cloud Antivirus is in beta stage and, as such, Softpedia awarded it a three-star rating, which is the default appraisal for a work in progress.
Check out the application in action:
