Review ESET Smart Security

I love ESET Smart Security and have been using it for over a year. If you ask anyone who is computer “savvy”, they’ll know about (and may already use) ESET.
I’ve reviewed ESET in great detail here. For sake of brevity, I’ll explain the best details in this handbook.

When you first start the program, you will be presented with the simple menu. You can enable the advanced menu by clicking at the bottom of the main menu. The interface for this program is simple and intuitive with a clean dashboard that shows you the most recent statistics from the program. From the main menu, you can see the status of the different modules of ESET Smart Security. If you are going to use this program, I highly recommend running all the modules together. This way, you do not need a separate firewall, anti-spam, or anti-spyware program running in the background.

Note: the screenshots I will show you are from the business edition. I will only cover features available in the home edition.

System Scanning
The system scanning is both quick and efficient and in, in my opinion, quicker than any other virus program I’ve ever used. You are shown a simple interface while the system scans your files, which is an improvement over many programs which show an elaborate display when checking your computer.

Scheduled Protection
I always like my computer to run a schedule so that tasks are taken care of without my intervention. Virus scanning is no exception to this rule and ESET comes with a built in scheduler so you don’t have to worry about setting up a schedule tasks via Windows control panel.

Harm Prevention
Protection against viruses is great but prevention is even better and ESET constantly update their virus definitions to ensure that the even the newest viruses are well protected against. Virus updates do not consume unnecessary system resources and do not fail–other antivirus programs I have used have issues with updating and sometimes need a manual fix.

Harm Protection

Most viruses should not find their way on to your system, because of real-time protection, and should be caught immediately. However, if a virus is detected during a scan, it will also be quarantined where you can review it and delete it if necessary.

You can even submit the file to ESET for further analysis. This will help you identify if the file is malicious and also help ESET protect other users who may have the same file on their machine.

Resource Usage
Virus checkers are a notoriously bloated and slow your system down to a halt when I running a scan. Many people who use ESET hold it high because it uses such low system resources. I’ve never completely tested this rely on the fact my computer still runs just fine when the scans are running. For this review, I decided to run a deep system scan and monitor system resources. The results of this experiment are shown below:

As you can see from the enlarged screenshot, even with a full system scan running, system resources are at 22% on a 2 GHz dual core processor (T7250.) RAM usage is also very low but this is not usually a problem with most virus scanners.