NOD32 vs. Comodo
Downloading Viruses
Next, I went to the site www.eicar.org to test out how well the antivirus programs could find viruses. On that site they include various file formats of viruses. The first one, the most basic, is a .com file. The second file I used was a .zip file and the third was a .zip file that had a .zip file inside of it. Overall, both versions of the virus protection software blocked the virus. I was surprised to see that Comodo’s Secure DNS did not block or alert me of any potential virus. It took Comodo 11.47 seconds to figure out it was a virus. The first time, however, the virus protection on the host computer (NOD32) detected a virus inside of the virtual machine way before Comodo found it. I then disabled NOD32 on my host computer and tried downloading the virus again. The results were the same this time around.
When I tested the client machine using NOD32, downloading the same files sequentially, the virus protection only took 1.03 seconds to respond to the threat. In this test, NOD32 was clearly the winner. I’d hate to see what that virus could have done in the 11 seconds it took Comodo to realize it was a virus.
The final test I did, in regards to viruses, was to create my own .bat script that would make a new Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. It looked exactly the same as the regular icon, this one, however, when triggered would not only launch IE, but it would also remove all the files in the system32 folder. This would essentially crash the computer upon the next reboot. Amazingly, neither virus protection program detected this as a virus.
Uninstall Process
The uninstall process for each of these pieces of software was very easy. First, Comodo took a full 1 minute and 47.01 seconds to uninstall. After that it required a reboot. For NOD32, on the other hand, it only took 7.83 seconds to uninstall! NOD32 also required a reboot. There was a definitely a huge difference in favor of NOD32 here!
Conclusions
Overall, it is very clear that NOD32 was the winner in practically every area. The only potential flaw I could find in NOD32 compared to Comodo was that NOD32 did not have anything set to do a system scan on a weekly basis. Comodo was configured by default to scan weekly. Knowing this, I suppose the reasoning for this is because NOD32 was created to scan all accessed files and programs regularly in the background. In theory, if a virus was put on the computer in any way, NOD32 should catch it, therefore, not have a need to run full system scans on a regular basis.
I should also make a note that you get what you pay for. Some of the features people pay for in NOD32 are included in Comodo, they do, however, work better in NOD32. Overall, I will still pay my $40/year for NOD32 because I’d rather stay safe than sorry.
