Coranti 2010 is a Japanese antivirus that offers a unique advantage over standard free antivirus. Coranti 2010 actually includes 4 different antivirus engines that have the capability to simultaneously scan ones computer for viruses. The 4 engines are the F-Prot, Norman, Bitdefender, and the Ad-Aware engines. These engines working in concert provided excellent antivirus protection; almost 100% against all known spyware and viruses.
The installation of Coranti 2010 wasn’t exactly smooth. On the test system (Windows 7 Home 64bit) , the antivirus failed to install correctly. I kept getting driver error etc. Therefore, I installed the program on Vista 32 bit and was successful. After the installation, the Coranti 2010 wanted to update its definitions. The update process was lengthy and needed to download about 300 megabytes of definitions from Japan. The download speeds weren’t consistent. I think it would have been nice to at least include some definitions with the original install package which was only 46 megabytes in size.
Resource usage of Coranti 2010 is impressive. Given that it has 4 independent resident shields running at once, Coranti only used 33 megabytes of RAM across 3 different processes. This is pretty amazing considering it is almost less than just running Ad-aware by itself.
Coranti 2010 manages each of its antivirus engines as one. Therefore if one changes the scan level, heuristic level, and the scan depth it changes it for all of the antivirus engines. It would have been nice to change the settings for each individual scanner. I am impressed that the Norman scanning engine includes sandbox protection.
Scanning with Coranti 2010 is on par with any of the individual engines if they were operated independently. A full system scan took about 2 hours and it didn’t find any malware on the test system. Coranti 2010 quickly detected the eicar test virus.
Coranti 2010 includes a few other nice features. The first is the email scanner. The scanner supports outlook, thunderbird, and even bat. I haven’t seen a free antivirus with bat support. Next the program includes a scheduler.
In summary, Coranti 2010 isn’t yet a mainstream product. However, as I have always said, it's crucial to scan a computer with multiple antivirus to ensure that a computer is really virus free. Coranti 2010 allows any user to do that so it’s hard for me to complain.
