Zillya is a relatively new antivirus. The software company is based in the Ukraine and claims to have 500,000 active users there. One thing that stands out about Zillya are its very reasonably priced full versions (separate from its free offerings), easy to use interface, email scanning, and vast detection database (over 2 million known traces). The free version of Zillya comes with no strings attached. There is in fact no “full” antivirus version, rather an internet security version with an additional firewall and network protection. The free version of Zillya does not contain advertisements of any kind which is a treat when compared to every other free antivirus currently on the market.
Zillya free antivirus was easy to install and comes conveniently bundled in an .MSI install package. The full file size is only 44 megabytes making it one of the smallest free antivirus available. A few notes about the installation. The first is that the software warns the user of conflicts with another antivirus installed. Few if any free antivirus software actually alert the user to this situation. One problem with the installation is Zillya doesn’t let the user choose where to install the software. It just installs to the main operating system hard disk.
Once the install completed, the user is prompted to restart the computer. If one does not, they will be prompted that the antivirus kernel is not installed correctly (nice that the software even warns the user). After restart, the antivirus engine immediately started and Windows startup performance wasn’t even impacted. Unfortunately, Zillya free antivirus didn’t run an automatic definition update on the software’s first start. However, the update was scheduled within the next three hours (the software checks for antivirus updates every 3 hours).
The virus scanning engine of Zillya is really the core functionality of the software. The quick scan is quite quick completing in only 2 minutes. It also scans a plethora of files about 17,000 to be exact, against 2.5 million traces within the sort time period . The only problem with Zillya seems to be the memory usage. The program uses approximately 200 megabytes at all times. This is kind of a lot and exceeds all other free antivirus that I have reviewed. However, that being said, since the test system has 4 gigabytes of RAM, the performance impact was minimal to nonexistent. The program really is “lightweight” as everyday computing tasks are not noticeably impacted when compared to other antivirus engines.
In addition, to excellent virus scanning, Zillya free antivirus comes with a lot of nice extras. The first is email protection. Few antivirus even provide incoming and outgoing protection (one can also disable the antivirus signature on the bottom of any email). Next, Zillya includes download and Microsoft Office file protection. If any office file (extremely common way to exploit a vulnerability on a system) or file is downloaded or opened from Internet Explorer (no Firefox support) it gets scanned. Zillya also includes scheduling, exclusion list, and quarantine capability. It seems the only thing missing is a zero day protection network (found in PC tools new free antivirus 2011).
