CA Anti-Virus 2008 - A Rhapsody in Blue

CA AntiVirus is solely a virus scanner and doesn't include a lot of other bells and whistles. But as a virus scanner it comes fully loaded. The software includes a real-time scanner, a full system scanning interface, and an email scanner. It offer plenty of reports so you can see what the scanning engines found and what it did with them. You can set up scheduled tasks through the interface and update the software.

Perhaps the slickest feature is the contact option. This feature will send an email to the address you specify telling you when a virus has been found. This is great for people who travel or who have the software installed on servers that they rarely log into. My home security company offers a feature like this. If I'm travelling and there's a security problem, my service will attempt to call me. And if they can't reach me, they'll send out an email immediately letting me know there was a problem and how they dealt with it. This is a nice value-add to eTrust.
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The client can be plugged into a central management server (if available) allowing all the updates and reporting to be received from or send to that central location. It can also serve as a redistribution point for updates. The update feature is robust and users can choose to updates only specific components as well as tell eTrust where to download updates. Multiple locations can be included for optimal service.
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Many of the important features of the real-time scanner can be controlled from the system tray. The scanners can be disabled instantly and the task tray includes a "snooze" option. When you choose to put the scanners to sleep, eTrust produces a small dialog box that allows you to determine how many minutes the scanner will ignore your files.
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This is one of the best implementations of this feature of all the virus scanners I tested. It works so well because the important choices are right off of the task bar so you don't have to load the main application, and the scanners respond instantly. There have been times when an application has needed all the processing power of my computer immediately and turning off the scanners quickly without having to load another application is a big plus. The main eTrust application can also be launched from the tray icon.

The runtime scanners detected the virus in the Eicar test file and dealt with it.
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The main eTrust application is actually a web application, which is a distinction between eTrust and its peers. They also distinguished themselves by going with a more mellow color scheme instead of the red and black or bright oranges that other apps are going with. I guess if I'm having virus problems, looking at an interface clothed in baby blue will be more soothing than traffic-cone orange.

The UI uses a button and tab metaphor like most of the other virus scanners I tested. Unlike many of the other packages, eTrust's interface is clean, clear, and a pleasure to use. It's fast (surprising, given that it’s a web application) and the designers did a great job on layout. The spacing between the group boxes is large enough so the elements don't appear cluttered, and even within the boxes themselves, the elements are nicely spaced giving the UI an airy feel.
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The engineers managed potential page rendering problems (e.g., some elements rendering in the UI before the functionality is in place) by loading the page in the background and then enabling all the elements when the given page is fully loaded. The main drawback with this approach is that each change of the UI means a short wait. But even on my relatively slow machine, the wait never reached the annoying point.
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The reports are clear and give plenty of information. Clicking on the Print button will open the report in a larger browser window and attempt to launch the browser's print utility. In my tests, this worked as expected.
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Whereas the reports used a long document format, the logs used a table and paging approach. Both formats worked for their respective information types.
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I ran some non-scientific tests to evaluate whether the scanning software would cause some obvious and immediate problems with basic tasks like browsing the Web and copying files. I wrote a small software program that would precisely time these operations. I ran a first set of tests without the software installed and running, and a second set with eTrust running in the background with all scanners turned on. For the first test, I copied five 21 MB files over my home network from the local machine (on which eTrust would be installed) to a network share. The second test copied 300 8K files over the network. I was testing to see if smaller files, and more of them, would affect the scanners negatively. Finally, my program went to five major websites (with complex layouts) and downloaded their home pages. I ran each test five times on a machine with a 2.2 GHz Celeron, 1 GB of RAM, and Windows XP SP2 with all the latest service packs. Here are the results:

No Scanners
1. Large files: 15683 ms
2. Small files: 5123 ms
3. Websites: 5994 ms

Scanners
1. Large files: 15593 ms
2. Small files: 5187 ms
3. Websites: 5973 ms

In my testing, the scanners had no impact on these basic file and web operations. In fact, of all the virus software I've reviewed, eTrust performed the best. The runtime scanners eat up about 63 MB of memory.