15-Minute Reviews :: Prevx 2.0 v1.0.2 Build 47 ABC

Hello everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Prevx version by Prevx Ltd. – Another player in the world of anti-virus and anti-malware.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Prevx 2.0 provides the breadth and depth of technologies necessary to combat the ever increasing sophistication of malicious software. Prevx’s unique implementation of ‘herd intelligence’, malware virtualization, frequency analysis, centralized behavioral heuristics and automated malware research gives a significant advantage, one that translates into faster, more extensive and accurate determination of malware to provide the highest levels of security.”

Quick Pros

• Heuristic-based service on top of definition-based scanning
• Easy to use (After install) and manage
• Seems to scan all aspects of the system as it goes
• Program Monitor an interesting concept
• Covers a lot of aspects of your system
• Relinquishes memory used after scanning

Quick Cons

• Prevx service would not start and install wouldn’t complete on Windows XP
• Nightmare first reboot under Vista (Arfter hard reboot okay)
• Prevx Agent hovers around 1 percent CPU usage full-time
• Too many ‘spikes’ in CPU usage and memory

Expansion

Well, my experience has been rather interesting with this application. My first attempt to install it on my test system failed miserably. Every time the installer would hit 95 percent, it would hang for a few moments; At this point I would get a service launch error that it had timed out. I tried a few times to coax it into starting and installing, but nothing seemed to work. I even flipped through the comments at Giveaway of the Day to see if anyone else had an issue similar to mine to no avail. I did see the alternate download link for Vista so I decided to brave it and try it on my main system. This is where the fun started. After I installed and performed my first reboot, as Vista came back up I already knew I was in for a world of hurt with the reboot. My desktop backgrounds were mangled; My desktop icons for a short moment were on the left screen (normally on right except a few) and then disappeared; Everything locked up including Explorer. When I tried to get to the task manager, it took almost 2 minutes the first time to get to it and it launch. Very little CPU usage; No memory leaks occuring and I did not detect any hard drive access; Nothing that should have frozen everything on my computer and made Task Manager so unbearably slow. I tried to shut down, but nothing worked. Finally, I had to manually reboot. After the system came back up, it came up fine; My icons all back and everything running smooth again.

When I first got into Prevx, it does an initial series of scans to ensure everything is clean so far. It does not do a full system scan to start with; It only checks for issues that are already an issue. After it did its thing, I popped up the Task Manager to start watching CPU and memory usage (I’ll talk about this more below.) I found the interface was pretty easy to get around and not overwhelming. The application did all what it is supposed to it seems. There are a bunch of manual scan functionality, including the Program Monitor. What is interesting about the Program Monitor is that you can have Prevx actively watch one specific application for anything it may try to do. This would be great for applications which you are not quite sure of; A privacy scrubber you’re hoping it isn’t offloading your information to a server while erasing it or otherwise. It does seem to do what it is supposed to do (Even though I can not verify that it finds anything – My main system I run very clean and won’t use it to intentionally find malware.) If you bring up the console and click on Advanced, you will get an idea of all of what this application can cover; Browsers, email, drivers, network, startup and more.

Now the miserable part; This application makes your system pay for what it offers. During even idle times, the agent itself sits at 1 percent CPU usage constantly an an Athlon X2 3800. That is a bit of processor time for just being idle. With this, while it is sitting idle, the console and the agent sit at a small 6MB footprint, but this also spikes when you do anything. When I launched Thunderbird for example, my CPU spiked to 20 percent for a few moments and memory usage climbed to 20MB. It does this every time you launch an application, and any time it loads some potentially-malicious file (DLLs, etc.) While it isn’t as bad as others I’ve used in the past (McAfee and Symantec are the worst for lagging a system), I definitely would not want to use this on a system that performance is key. I also had the application randomly ‘scan’ processes twice while I was just typing this review, which spiked usage up to max on one core and brought total memory usage up to 38MB RAM while it scanned. This could be a real issue for gamers; A sudden lag spike for seconds could spell the end of a player (And likely the end of Prevx) – What was odd about the process scanner that popped up on its own, is that it only happened in the first 10 minutes of tinkering; The next half hour I never saw it again. I hope this is an isolated incident that occurs right after startup, because this would end this application off my system very fast otherwise. The main redeeming factor is that when the application isn’t running, it gives back most of the memory it used during its scanning process. Ultimately, because of heuristic scanning and likely the power of this application, you will possibly see a performance hit during peak usage.

Final Verdict

While this application shows some signs of being a good alternative to the big boys in the market (Namely that it covers all aspects of malware at the same time instead of having 3-6 applications doing similar tasks.) While I do not know how many other applications use heuristic scanning, the fact that this application uses the technology could be a blessing or a curse. If it picks up one of your applications as malware because of aggressive heuristic scanning, you may have some serious issues – This could also ring true with it using the ‘community’ database online. This application seems to do what it is supposed to when you do get up and running. That said, I will also note that I am nervous about this application when I can’t install it under Windows XP, and the Vista install’s first reboot goes horrendously wrong, I find it hard to recommend this application. If you do download it and use it while free, I just caution you to take care of your system with backups. As for paying $24.95 for a year for this application; I’d likely suggest that you wait until a little more stability from the installer comes along.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, July 05, 2007