Review: Kaspersky Internet Security 2009

The suite of protection offered by Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is impressive. Ranging from basic anti-virus protection to advanced application integrity monitoring, Kaspersky raises the bar by also including several lines of support, including phone support from 8am to 9pm. Kaspersky scans web traffic in real time for malware, blocks annoying advertisements, and updates its database hourly, which should help prevent against the computer being infected with newer malware. Considering that each of these abilities could be sold individually as separate products, I believe the Kaspersky suite offers good price to value ratio. The only reason I don't rate it excellent is that the $79.95 price tag may put it out of reach of some potential customers.

Downloading and installing Kaspersky was very straight-forward. Simply download the executable, double-click, and the installation wizard starts and prompts you for the basic information that it needs to install, including the key. After installation, the computer must be rebooted for Kaspersky to take affect. After the computer reboots, the application first tells the user that they are at risk, however, this screen only means that Kaspersky needs to update its internal database. During the update, the progress indicator remained at 99% for what seemed to be several minutes, and I briefly wondered if the application was hung up or if it was still working. Kaspersky also includes its own logging monitor, so I was able to open that up and view each file being downloaded in real time as the application database was updated.

Only once since installing Kaspersky have I noticed any performance hit, and that was during the first full system scan. On my test system, a quickly aging Acer Aspire 1640 (Win XP Pro, SP3, Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz, 1G RAM), I have not seen any noticable lag in application launch time or in response time from the overall system. Performance, or the lack of any noticable impact on performance is extremely important in this genre of application because if the responsiveness of the system goes down, or worse, the application locks the system up, then the application is going more harm than good. Kaspersky gets around this problem by being almost invisible, and running silently in the background. Exactly what its supposed to do.

Kaspersky provides a very simple interface that hides the complexity and the power of the application underneath. The main screen provides four options to the left, being Protection, Scan, Update, and License. The first three make sense, I'm not sure why there is a section dedicated just to the license. In the License screen you can see when your licese expires and, if necissary, go to the Kaspersky web site to renew it. What I really like about the application interface is the large color coded bar at the top, which tells you in bold lettering if your computer is protected or not. When there is a problem, the bar is red, and when everything is running smoothly, the bar is green. Overall the user interface is logical and easily navigated, but I did have to hunt around a little at first to find the settings. I turns out that the settings window is the same if you click on the "Settings" button at the top of the main screen or if you click on on of the options and select "Settings" from the contextual drop down menu.