CA Internet Security 2009 Too Cumbersome And Intrusive
When I attended CA World 2008 this year I received a free copy of CA Internet Security 2009 with a free one year license. I decided to uninstall Comodo Firewall and Avira Antivirus Free Edition and give it a proper test and run for the money. I let it run for 24 hours on my system and installed all default features and functionality.
The product does take quite a while to install and it took almost four hours to scan my entire system, it only found some tracking cookies from my firefox and declared that my utorrent was a trojan. It seemed to have a small memory footprint but bounced between 1% and 20% cpu utilization depending on how much internet browsing I was doing.
Then I noticed the problems and severe performance degradation particularly with Firefox and Google Chrome. CA installs its horrendous CA Analyzer Bar which validates every URL is from a registered authority which is pointless in my opinion. Worse every link you hover over in every page the CA product tries to scan, if you single click it won’t follow links anymore you have to double click to follow links. Google Chrome suffered a huge performance hit as when I open 20-30 tabs which all used to open in about 35 seconds now take 2 minutes to fully load as the CA product scans each URL.
Here is a screenshot of this horrid toolbar (click for larger view)
I went through firefox and uninstalled the toolbar, reconfigured the CA Internet Security to stop the web browser monitoring, but still the link validation was being performed. The cumbersome control panel, intrusive interference with the web browsers and overall system speed degradation caused me to uninstall this product rapidly.
I am now back to installing the Avira Antivirus Freeware Edition which is my favorite antivirus product to date, this is after testing Avast, CA Internet Security, Norton Antivirus among a few others. Avira has a small memory footprint, low CPU utilization, catches trojans, spyware and viruses very well and it doesn’t cost an annual subscription or purchasing. I would eventually like to see how the premium edition fares and performs against the free edition, but I have had no reason to upgrade I am so happy with the freeware version.
So for anyone looking for spyware, virus and malware protection, I still recommend Avira Antivirus even after several main stream programs have been purchased and tested.
-Dragon Blogger
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this program was such a waste of time for me.
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