In November 2002, I was attending COMDEX in Las Vegas. As I walked the show
floor, I found a booth from a company called Hauri that was marketing an antivirus product called ViRobot
Expert. I had a few minutes before I had to leave for the airport, so I decided
to talk to the representatives from Hauri and see if its product was worth
further review.
During my conversation, I found out that although I had never heard of Hauri or ViRobot, Hauri had been a major player in the Asian antivirus market for a few years, but was just beginning to market the product in the United States. During our conversation, the Hauri sales representative made all sorts of outrageous claims about the product that I didn’t quite believe and assumed were just hype. Sensing my disbelief, the sales representative gave me a copy of the software and told me to take it home, put it through the paces, and call him and let him know what I thought of it.
After several months of testing and probing, I can tell you that the Hauri rep’s claims are all legitimate. I have tested ViRobot inside and out and can honestly say that it is the best antivirus software that I have ever used. I have purchased the enterprise version of the software and use it to protect my own computer network. ViRobot is one of those rare pieces of software that truly distinguishes itself from the competition because it is so outstanding.
Why ViRobot Expert?
ViRobot Expert is the desktop product in Hauri’s line of ViRobot antivirus software. This software is suitable for both home office users and for network workstations within a corporation. The software is designed to run in Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000 Professional, and XP. Hauri also makes versions of ViRobot for UNIX, Linux, and Windows servers. There is even a version of ViRobot for Microsoft Exchange.
What makes ViRobot so special? In short, ViRobot can completely reverse the damage caused by some of the most common viruses. Many of the leading antivirus products simply quarantine infected files or delete them. However, ViRobot is able to remove the infection and return the file to its original state.
The other thing that I like about ViRobot is that the scanning engine is extremely efficient. We’ve all seen situations in which someone will run a full system scan on a PC and the PC will slow to a crawl and become almost completely unusable until the scan completes. However, ViRobot is designed to have extremely low processor overhead. In fact, your users may not even know that a full system scan is running. On my test PC, a full system scan pushed my Pentium 4 machine to a mere 4 percent processor utilization. The low processor utilization makes ViRobot perfect for people who don’t want to get slowed down by their antivirus software or for anyone who has an older machine that has trouble efficiently running other antivirus packages.
Like other leading antivirus products, ViRobot Expert has a resident scanning engine that examines files as they are accessed. The software also integrates itself into Internet Explorer and into Microsoft Outlook. In doing so, ViRobot protects you against Internet-based and e-mail viruses.
By far, the software’s coolest feature is that it can actually monitor individual running processes on your machine and look for viral code within them. If a running process is found to contain viral code, the software will alert you to the infection and give you a chance to save your work. It will then shut down the infected process, disinfect the code, and then restart the previously infected application. Within a few seconds, you can resume work as though nothing had ever happened.
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