The newly designed interface of eScan Total Security Suite 14 shows what it has to offer in a clear, easy-to-understand window. There are nine main panels, each of which, when clicked, leads to a setting s and info overlay. At the bottom there are separate links for scan and update, and to a series of utilities. The nine main panels offer AV for files and mail, web protection and privacy control, a two-way firewall, anti-spam, endpoint security (cleaning USB drives etc), identity and cloud protection. The last of these, like many other IS suites, uses data collected from customers and held in the Cloud for quick identification of zero-day threats. Modules missing from the list include file backup and PC tune-up, though the separate Tools pane offers specific applets for registry cleaning, disk defragmentation and scanning for application vulnerabilities. There’s also a rescue mode available, by burning a dedicated disk from an ISO image. The scan module is flexible, enabling scans of memory and registry, whole PC, USB devices and CDs/DVDs, as well as offering a fully customisable scan. A scheduler is provided and you can set up multiple different regimes for different types of scan. Web protection puts up red, orange and green icon icons against sites thrown up in Google searches, based on a database of customer experiences. It was hard to find one that wasn’t green, but that’s often the case with this kind of signalling. It’s as well the program design is largely self-explanatory, as the help system is online and dumps you at an initial page, wherever in the suite you call it from. It would be much better if it determined the context of the help request. There are two schools of thought to the targeting of files to be included in an AV scan. When we scanned our 50GB basket of files, we discovered eScan Total Security Suite 14 is definitely in the ‘scan as few as you can‘ school. It examined just 8,761 files and took 17 minutes 4 seconds to do it. This makes it one of the shortest scans of any IS suite we’ve reviewed, though it has a slow scan rate of 8.6 files/s. A repeat scan was even quicker, at 14min 30s, though it still looked at the same number of files. Our test PC took just 5 seconds longer to copy a 1GB file with a background scan running than without one, so only a 5 percent resource hit.The German testing site AV-Test (www.av-test.org) saw a rather bigger performance drop in its more extensive Performance tests. It measured a 4s slowing, giving the eScan suite a score in that category of 4.0/6.0. This was the only place, though, that the suite dropped a point. In the Protection category, it didn’t miss a single infected file, zero-day or established, scoring a perfect 6.0/6.0. Under the Usability heading, which looks at false positives thrown up by the software, it only gave 2 through all testing, which wasn’t enough to cost it any points, with a perfect 6.0/6.0 in that section, too. That’s 50 percent better than the average for the whole group it tested.
