Dear Antivirus: A Pretty Face Is Not Enough

I've reviewed more antivirus utilities than I can count. I used to see a lot of products that did the job but looked like a train wreck. Clearly all the development budget went into protection, none into user interface. That's becoming less common, as vendors realize that modern users demand ease of use and an attractive interface along with effective malware protection.

In my recent evaluation of I may have discovered the other extreme. With this product, it looks like all of the budget went into appearance, none into protection. I hope this isn't a trend!

All Style
Anvi's main window is sleek, in shades of grey with bits of glowing blue for decoration. Mousing over controls lights them up. You can click buttons at the top to move between the five tabs, or click arrows at left and right to slide back and forth.

At the end of a scan it doesn't blast you with a list of found threats. It just reports how many problems it found and offers to remove them. That's nice for most users. Me, I always dig into the details, but I'm not a normal user.

No Substance
When I went to tally up the results, I was amazed, and not in a good way. I use an Excel spreadsheet that displays different colors to represent different degrees of cleanup success. A perfect cleanup job is green, shading to yellow as more and more non-executable traces are left behind. If the software detected a threat but left behind executable files, that's orange; if any of the files are running despite detection, it's a deeper orange. And if it totally failed to detect the threat, that cell displays bright red.

Anvi's row (the top row in the compressed image above) had two green cells and one yellow. All the rest were danger colors – orange and red. And indeed, Anvi earned a new low score for malware cleanup.

Most products do a lot better when I install them on a clean system and test their ability block new malware attacks. It totally makes sense that fending off a new attack with security protection in place will be easier than digging out malware that's put down roots already. Some of the products wipe out the vast majority of my malware samples the minute I open the sample folder in Windows Explorer.

Here again the colors tell a story. Some of the rows in the compressed image above are almost entirely green, meaning the product blocked almost every attack. Anvi, at the top, is 40 percent red, meaning it totally missed 40 percent of the threats.

Bonus: Destruction!
Anvi may have missed some malicious files, but that didn't stop it from identifying perfectly valid files as malware. Notepad, MineSweeper, and a number of Windows components were among the victims. I submitted each to the VirusTotal website, which reports results from 42 distinct antivirus engines. Every file got a clean bill of health from every engine.

The people at AnviSoft seem quite nice, and quite enthusiastic. I don't take any pleasure in slamming their product. But given my testing experience, and given that none of the big labs have run the product through their tests, I had to conclude that using this free product could cost you plenty. For details, read my .