The Good
With the help of this program, you can protect your computer from viruses, worms, Trojans, rootkits, adware, spyware, dialers, jokes, hacktools and riskware. It features a real-time guard against incoming threats, virus and spam scanner for Microsoft Office emails, along with a firewall.
There are three scanning modes available (quick, full, custom) and you can customize advanced settings regarding heuristics, exclusions, and resources usage limit, together with automatic actions for each threat type, removable media, installation packages, archives, and so on. Items can be sent to a quarantine.
Likewise, you can configure advanced settings for the mail and real-time guards. As for the firewall, you can create rules for each app, control their network access, and modify the working parameters for known networks. In addition, you can enable password protection, email notifications and a self-protection module, as well as study statistics and reports.
The real-time protection module performed excellently in our tests, as it immediately reacted while we extracted several thousands of virus samples from a password-protected archive. The scan time was very good (scanned all virus samples in roughly 5 minutes). As for the malware detection ratio, Dr.Web Anti-virus had a success rate of roughly 94.4% (identified 8951 virus samples out of 9002).
The app is multilingual and worked smoothly on Windows 8.1 Pro during our evaluation, without triggering the OS to hang, crash or prompt error dialogs. OS compatibility extends to Windows 7, Vista and XP.
Help documentation is available. CPU and RAM consumption was low when the tool was in idle state.
The Bad
It has a lot of processes running in the background. A quick look in Task Manager showed us two entries for the SpIDer agent (one for the admin module), anti-rootkit server, control service, one firewall process for the Windows notification module and another for the Windows service, along with two entries for the scanning engine.
The Truth
To be honest, we didn't expect much from Dr.Web Anti-virus, since it's not very popular amongst antivirus product users. However, we were more than impressed. According to our tests, Dr.Web Anti-virus is light on the system resources, speedy, highly effective, comfortable to work with, filled with advanced settings, and not expensive when considering all these aspects. Needless to say, you should download, install and test it for yourself.
