Panda Global Protection 2010 Review: Complete Protection for Windows

 The entire process of installing Panda GP 2010 took 9 minutes (including 1 minute of memory scan during installation). There are three methods to install the program: Minimum, Typical or Custom installation. The recommended installation by Panda Security is the typical method but this will not install a parental control feature. Fear not because you can always install the said feature even after you’ve installed Panda GP 2010.

A reboot is required before you can start using its protection or configuring the program and it will use 299MB of hard-disk space after installation. Panda GP 2010 supports the new operating system by Microsoft – Windows 7 and the earlier edition: Vista and XP.

The User Interface of Panda GP 2010 is really neat and simple: Status, Scan, Report, Quarantine and Services are the available tabs in using the program. The only default settings in Panda GP 2010 that I will recommend is to change the anti-virus action when a threat is found from “automatically disinfect” to “ask for action” because Panda GP 2010 will not put a copy of any detected threat in quarantine unless it cannot disinfect a detected risk. Note that during installation of Panda GP 2010, I allowed it to run a scan. It detected a spyware in appsetup.exe that is located in System32 directory of Windows. This is false positive because it’s a legitimate Creative Technology installer. The file was automatically disinfected (deleted and no copy in quarantine!).

Panda GP 2010 features includes also a self-diagnostic (to ensure that program is operating correctly and up-to-date).

Panda GP 2010 will use 956KB of memory while it’s busy doing its job: To protect the system. During a full system scan, the scanner will use 36MB of memory. What I do not like with its scanner window is there is no way to minimize it.

The full system scan of Panda is good in detecting malware attachments in e-mail. I have 15 malware attachments in my sent box and Panda found 14 threats.

The real-time protection of Panda is poor. I tried transferring 50 malware samples from external drive to the system drive but it prevented 8 malware files only and let the remaining 42 samples to be save in the desktop. The good news is, its on-demand scanner is able to detect more.

On-demand scan on remaining 42 malware samples: Panda is able to detect another 39 threats . This leave the system unprotected against 3 malware files only. This is why a regular scan using anti-virus is important. You’ll never know if the on-access scanner is really doing its job until you’ve done a thorough scan on the system. Over all, the real-time protection and detection ability of Panda is considered as Advanced protection for detecting 47 out of 50 malware sample.

Panda Global Protection 2010’s price is $69.95 for single PC or $89.95 for 3 PCs. A good deal for anti-malware with backup, vulnerability scanner, USB Vaccine and more! A 30 days trial with e-mail support is available.