ossblogger.com

I have used few antivirus before. My first antivirus was Norton, which comes pre-installed with my Acer notebook 3 years ago. When the registration for Norton expires 3 months after that, I looked for an alternative - cracked version of Norton which eventually gone corrupt (as they detect that my antivirus was an illegal one), and I have to re-install my Windows.

I started looking for other antivirus, and proprietary antivirus was not an options, as I don’t like paying for a software. I used free version of AVG for a couple of years, until I found out that it has some limitation on removing one particular virus at that time (Brontok C, if you have heard of it…).

I then tried ClamAV, an open source antivirus, which did a very good job at removing viruses, but the lack of its ability to do some of the features that I wanted, has made me change to avast.

Until few days back, when I decided to blog about the best free alternative for proprietary software around the internet, I found out that Moon Secure Antivirus one of the option for you to use for your computer security.

The Software:

Developed by 3 developer, Moon Secure Antivirus is written for Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP). It aims to be the best Free Antivirus for Windows under GPL license. It offers multiple scan engines, Net shield, Firewall, On access, on Exec scanner and rootkits preventions plus features from Commercial Antivirus applications.

The size of the installation package is 10.3MB, and after installation, the application occupies 18.22MB of your hard disk space. Installation process was flawless, although with another antivirus is running in the background (I forgot to disable my avast). After the installation, your computer will be automatically secured by the antivirus.

Problems arise when I get to know Moon Secure Antivirus more. Clicking Moon Antivirus folder from my All Programs button will only show “Uninstall Moon Secure Antivirus”, and you can only execute the application for a scan from the running process of your applications on the taskbar. Right clicking the Moon Secure Antivirus button will show this:

You have to update your virus definition database first, before you can start scanning for virus. Oh, don’t forget to disable any other antivirus that you have before scanning with Moon Secure Antivirus, as the process will be terminated prematurely, as it can conflict with other antivirus program. My avast stopped Moon Secure Antivirus scanning process while the latter do the scanning.

After the virus database has been updated, this screen will show:

After that, I did a scan on my hard disk. The graphical user interface (GUI) was very minimal, with only 3 menus in the menubar; Options, Logs, and Infected Files. I notice that you need to run the update before you do the scan. Otherwise, you may get an error message.

How good?

I can’t really tell how good the antivirus is, as after scanning all my hard disk, it does not find any virus. It passes the test with a test virus from eicar.org. It managed to disinfect the test virus, but not delete it.

One more thing. Using Moon Secure Antivirus as your computer antivirus will trigger off your Windows Security Center. It does not recognize Moon Secure Antivirus as a “valid” antivirus to be used for your system. Just declare to your security center that you are using your own antivirus and will be monitoring your computer yourself.

So, if you are looking for a free and simple antivirus solution, Moon Secure Antivirus can do the job well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.