Innobate Antivirus is a free antivirus that has just been recently released. The basic edition, the one which we are reviewing, appears to offer only virus scanning capability and not virus removal. However, Innobate Basic still includes multiple real-time shields, auto updating, and my favorite, a talking capability.
The installation of Innobate Basic was simple. The initial installation went without a hitch. However, after the program was installed, Innobate Basic executed a lot of concurrent processes. These includes running a full system scan and updating the virus databases. These concurrent process made the program balloon in its resource usage and caused some problems (we will talk about them later). Some nice things about the installer are that it includes 64 bit support and is in the .msi format for easy installation across a network.
By far my favorite feature, and bound to annoy many users, is the TalktoMe setting. This is essentially the Avast 4.8 voice on an energy drink (kosher). A women’s voice will highlight every action of Innobate antivirus down to a supreme precision. For example, “the active scan started on September 19 at 2:30 pm” and then again when it stops and then again and again.. Personally, I kind of like the feature because often free antivirus stay idle in the task bar and I have no clue what is going on. Of course one can disable the feature, but it is a feature that is truly unique to Innobate Basic and hence trademarked.
Innobate Basic does have its problems and one of them is resource usage. Maybe this problem is confined to Windows 7 but memory and cpu usage are really subpar. With all the real-time antivirus engines turned on, the software uses a constant 10% CPU power and it doesn’t go below 5% at any time. And these CPU readings are with light computing activity. Also, the program uses 75 megabytes of RAM and an extra 156 megabytes from a process called Vscan. These system resource burdens are far and above almost all other free antivirus competitors.
The interface of Innobate isn’t the prettiest but its functional. There are only a few features they include the status, detected, quarantine, settings, and the update tabs. One thing that I like is that the Innobate Basic interface windows is resizable. In addition, there are a lot of virus scanning options. They include turbo, boost, nos, and memory scan modes. I wasn’t able to get them completely working so testing was inconclusive.
As of today Innobate Basic free antivirus is quite buggy. However, maybe it will suit some experienced user’s needs.
