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ETrust EZ Antivirus is a simple, effective tool to disinfect your disks.
Computer Associates' original antivirus product, Inoculate IT, once was the best deal in the industry: It was free for home users. But along with canine sock puppets, most Internet freebies are just distant memories. Renamed ETrust EZ Antivirus and garnished with a $20 price tag (plus a $10 annual renewal fee after the first year), Computer Associates' offering is still a bargain compared to competitors, which are priced in the $30 to $60 range. And it proved to be a top-notch virus killer in our lab tests. The ETrust line also includes a firewall, an e-mail scanner for messages with malicious code, and a suite that bundles all three utilities.
EZ Antivirus arrived too late for us to include in the "Stealth Fighters" head-to-head review of antivirus utilities in our September issue. But we asked our antivirus tester, Joe Wells (founder of WildList Organization International), to run EZ Antivirus through the same battery of tests for this review.
Offered as a 3.9MB download from the Computer Associates Web site, EZ Antivirus retains the simple Inoculate IT interface, which mimics Windows Explorer. Two panels on the top of the program window allow you to navigate your computer and select entire drives or drill down to individual folders or files for on-demand virus scanning. A third panel at the bottom logs the scan results. Like all major antivirus products today, EZ Antivirus also includes an on-access or "real-time" scanner that automatically checks a file for dangerous code when you attempt to open it or make...