ZenOK is a brand new free antivirus that was literally released last night. This fact doesn’t instill a lot of confidence about the performance of the software but we thought we would review it anyway. If one travels to the ZenOK website they will notice that the company claims the free antivirus offers a lot of protection. There features are as follows antivirus and antispyware engines, push virus updates that arrive several times per day, secure download and email capabilities, p2p scanning functionality, and fast virus scanning. The ZenOK is bundled with the companies online backup solution that isn’t free. The company’s headquarters are located in the United States so the software can’t be that bad. One concerning thing was that one of the latest viruses threats was the eicar test virus which has been released for a while.
The ZenOK download size was an impressive 35 megabytes and the installation went extremely quickly. The software required a reboot after the installation completed but I opted out. Once the software started for the first time the user is prompted to create an account and login. The first time I attempted to registered it resulted in a failure. The second time I was successful and gained my free license. Once ZenOK free antivirus started, the program immediately started a slow unobtrusive virus scan. During the scan, the software used about 50 megabytes across two services and about 3 percent CPU power. These numbers are pretty impressive for a slow scan (the company’s ultra light scan). I then decided to start a full system virus scan. The CPU activity jumped to about 12 percent and scanned about 50 files per second. I thought it was interesting how there was an icon for “bomb” count in the detected malicious items. I haven’t seen this in other free antivirus programs.
One thing that ZenOK does very well are the interface design. The program really does look good. This includes how the website is presented and the status of one’s computer within the software. ZenOK could really teach some other antivirus companies about usability.
Finally, the ZenOK antivirus also includes a hard drive monitoring utility that displays the temperature and few other settings.
I like the idea of including a free antivirus with a backup service. However, I would have preferred that the company partnered with AVG or Avast as these companies have proven track records on performance. Not to ding ZenOK but it hasn’t arrived at the mature product status yet. It will be interesting to see what the company has to offer in the future.
