Comparison of free antivirus for Windows XP, Vista and 7

What is the difference between the 2008 (4.0.25) version tested by us here and the current version (6.10.25) of PC Tools AntiVirus Free Version? The answer, without joking, is none! In reality though, the number of viruses defined in PC Tool’s Intelli-Signatures have increased from 362 354 to 592 798… The interface in XP, Vista or under 7 doesn’t vary one bit. This antivirus is supposed to protect users from all kinds of viral attacks including viruses, worms and Trojan Horses, and like with the previous version, IntelliGuard protects the PC in real time and monitors all files in the memory and those that have been downloaded. This service also contains three other modules: File Guard which monitors and deletes malicious files, E-mail Guard which watches over the POP3 and SMTP protocols and Memory Guard which looks out for threats lodged in certain parts of the memory.

Besides this, we also find the classic manual and scheduled scans. The Intelli-Scan module only took 25 seconds to analyse 430 files on our machine. It scrounges through the running processes, start up zones, Windows Hosts files, shared DLL files and service files, although the user can of course always decide to perform their full or custom scan if they wish.

The Settings tab is something that every user should look at to decide what action should be taken when threats are detected (quarantine, delete) and to configure the actions for email attachments (clean or simply warn the user). It is also in these settings where we can view the activity and start-up action logs (monitor in the background or perform a full scan).

PC Tools Antivirus free version doesn’t provide the user will a lot of innovative options, and the program also has the annoying tendency of detecting false positives.

Creator: PC Tools
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, 7, Supports Windows 32 and 64 bit versions
Version: 2009 (6.10.25)
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