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Quick Heal Antivirus Pro 2011 Review Free


27. February 2011

Quick Heal Antivirus Pro 2011 main screen

    Quick Heal has recently updated their antivirus line for 2011.  The new versions include a brand new interface and installer, claimed lower resource usage, faster scanning, firewall, a separate malware protection engine, and more.  The biggest complaint with the previous version was the interface.  The 2011 version really gives Quick Heal a more mainstream feel and kind of resembles the Trend Micro Titanium+ interface.  The settings are also similar to something from Norton with sliders.  In addition to comprehensive antivirus protection, Quick Heal 2011 includes a lot of additional and actually useful diagnostic tools including a track cleaner, system explorers and more.

    The installation of Quick Heal 2011 was very straight forward.  The program included a small initial installer that detected the 64 bit version and started the download.  Unfortunately, the installer is definitely on the larger side at 179 megabytes to be exact (one of the largest installers tested) but still includes a lot of features.  After the download finished, the program immediately started and didn’t require a reboot.  The installer ran an initial virus scan but didn’t warn of conflicting security software. The publishers have clearly done extensive testing on Windows 7.

setup downloader

    Quick Heal 2011 offers three scanning options the full system, custom, memory and boot time scans.  The full system scan, scans at approximately 3 to 4 megabytes (about 20 files) per second which is on the slower side.  The scanner seems to experience some slowdowns with archived and large files.  However, it’s nice that it shows the archived files contents as they are extracted and scanned.  I am personally intrigued by the Anti-Malware software that was included with the package.  Not too long ago I got a Trojan that attempted to install fake or rouge antivirus on the test system.  While none of the malware remains active (I hope), Quick Heal 2011 was able to detect all of the registry traces of the rouge antivirus and even listed the websites that they belong to.  This is after running multiple full system scans with Norton and other free antivirus.  Therefore, if one has rouge antivirus, Quick Heal 2011 is the ticket to remove them (it also has dedicated real time protection against them); I can’t emphasize this more. Quick Heal 2011 also offers cloud based scanning via the DNA Scan technology.  If  heuristics determines a suspicious file, it can be uploaded to the cloud for additional analysis.  Though it would have been nice if there was a quick scan option because full system scan took forever.  After 45 minutes the scanning was only 5% done.  There is a nice skip file or folder option if one thinks the scanning is taking too long.

Quick Heal Antimalware detection results

    In addition, to excellent virus and malware detection, Quick Heal has a ton of features.  I liked the email protection features in which only trusted email programs can send email. This is perfect against blocking spam irc bots.  There is a nifty registry restore backup feature.  It appears that Quick Heal 2011 takes a registry snapshot during installation.  When malware is detected, the program can automatically restore registry keys that may have been modified.   Even though, this is technically just an antivirus, it also includes a full functioning firewall.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the settings to customize it but inside the report view it is indicated that the firewall includes IDS and IPS systems.  In the tools section there is also the option to create an emergency CD.  Quick Heal 2011 will automatically install the latest virus definitions on the CD to clean boot sector viruses and locked malicious processes.  There is a dedicated USB drive protection option that protects against auto run files and scans a removable drive before it can become active.  Finally, there is a track cleaner and hijack restorer that can restore the host file and other important settings. 

full system scan progress

    Quick Heal 2011’s resource usage is quite subpar.  During scanning, the program started an additional process and used 191 megabytes of RAM and 7 to 8 percent CPU power.  While idle, Quick Heal 2011 used 20 megabytes of RAM.  These numbers are significantly more than the average free antivirus and definitely need some work.  Also, it seemed that concurrent computer usage was affected by the full system scan making it hard to complete other tasks (even with 8 effective processor cores).

    Quick Heal Antivirus Pro 2011 is definitely an improvement over the previous version.  However, while the scanner may offer great protection it needs some efficiency work.