F-secure antivirus 2009 review

We think that's bad because it can be very good depending on the state of your machine. In third-party, independent antivirus testing using live viruses, F-Secure Internet Security scored mixed results. In a test scanning a single folder with compressed and media files, F-Secure Internet Security completed this test in seconds, which was significantly longer than Kaspersky, Norton, and Trend Micro.

Although in terms of boot speed, F-Secure Internet Security took In terms of whether F-Secure Internet Security will protect your PC, we cite results from two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. The results are mixed. From AV-test. In the latest test results from AV-Comparatives. There's also a tutorial online which we think all vendors should offer , but no hardcore online documentation except for a quick installation guide.

Also, it would be nice to have a free support forum such as the one offered by Symantec. Conclusion Mostly troubled by little things we were not wowed by this product.

The price is the real kicker: considerably more than the competition while offering roughly the same features and performance. AV-Comparatives obtained a slightly weaker result, with F-Secure earning only one star out of three for real-world performance.

Although the malware protection was worthy of a two-star rating, F-Secure had 25 false positives. This could become an issue for some users, and programs like Avira have far fewer false positives without giving up security.

The final lab we use is MRG Effitas , where F-Secure gained a level-two pass, losing its level-one pass mark from early Because these are online tools, we used F-Secure Safe in these tests.

F-Secure Safe blocked all 13 of the test pages available on Wicar, even when the browser extension was disabled. AMTSO gives a better view of download protection. F-Secure could block different threats, such as potentially unwanted downloads and even the phishing page. The only test it failed was when downloading compressed files. Of the 10 compressed files available for download, it stopped three. We had to manually scan the other seven for F-Secure to recognize them as malware.

Even when F-Secure found these compressed files, it just warned us that we had to delete them manually. F-Secure relies heavily on its knowledgebase and forums to provide support. Some articles come with short videos that allow you to follow along with them more easily.

The community can solve most questions within a day, but more complex issues may take longer. Sometimes you might want to speak with a person, and F-Secure provides options for either a phone call or a live chat. Both are available during the day, and there are phone lines for different languages.

For a lightweight and simple antivirus, F-Secure is a great way to keep your devices safe. If you can make use of the strong parental controls with its more expensive product options, this might be the antivirus for you. If you want to look at some more reviews before you make a decision, our other antivirus articles can provide some great alternatives. What do you think of F-Secure antivirus? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

F-Secure Safe does not trigger protection when going to PayPal. Need help? Wave FreshBooks vs. Xero FreshBooks vs. JavaScript is disabled in your web browser For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Choose your country. Buy now Renew now Try for free. Advanced virus protection for your PC. Virus protection Protect your PC against viruses, spyware and other malware.

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Yet it also registered a remarkably high rate of false positives — harmless software flagged as malware — on all platforms except Windows Ideally, you don't want any false positives at all. In the charts below, you can see that F-Secure's malware protection holds its own against two antivirus brands whose products often top our rankings. F-Secure's system stopped percent of zero-day attacks in both months. The software also got a perfect percent score against widespread malware in September, but dropped in October to a still impressive It identified two harmless files as dangerous in October.

But those excellent scores were marred by a startling number of false positives — eight in November and nine in December, well above the industry average of five. It stopped F-Secure flew through AV-Comparatives' Windows 7-based "real-world" tests, stopping percent of online malware in both February and March testing. But again, the perfect scores were offset by five false positives in each month. Each extension uses F-Secure's SafeSearch engine to check the reputation of a web destination before loading a page.

Like many recent antivirus products, F-Secure Anti-Virus doesn't have its own firewall, but uses the built-in Windows one instead. The program also lacks a hardened web browser for online financial transactions, but that feature is included in the Safe and Internet Security products.

The machine had been upgraded from Windows 8. F-Secure Anti-Virus eats up a lot of system resources to do its job. Our custom OpenOffice benchmark test, which matches 20, names and addresses on a spreadsheet, took 7 minutes and 58 seconds to complete after F-Secure was installed, but without any active scan running.

That's 1 minute and 7 seconds, or