ESET Anti-Virus

I’m finally heeding my own advice. For many years, I’ve been doing without any sort of anti-virus software, not even free ones. Earlier this year, I planned to change that, and started to consider several solutions. I’ve been lucky so far, getting by without incident, but I suppose good luck won’t last forever. Well, I’ve now finally gotten around to installing something, ESET Cybersecurity for Mac.

The main reason why I’ve been putting off installation of an anti-virus software is the belief that it “adds weight” and slows down the user experience on the computer. After all, if the anti-virus software had to scan all file reads, downloads, and various other sort of activity on the computer, surely it is going to eat CPU cycles.

A related concern is battery life. Anything that eats CPU will also drain battery quickly. This is something not desirable on a notebook, particularly if you’ve to work without mains power.

ESET doesn’t sound like a very big brand compared with the likes of Symantec or McAfee. I was quite pleasantly surprised to hear that as an anti-virus vendor, ESET is ranked 4th in worldwide market share, after AVAST, Microsoft and Avira (OPSWAT Market Share Report September 2012).

I was drawn to ESET’s anti-virus solutions because they were reputed to be “light” on system resources and overheads. The company is bigger than I thought they were, and they seem to rank quite highly in various anti-virus software benchmarks or comparisons.

Back to the topic of system overheads and impact to system performance, well, I had to do some benchmarks to see exactly what difference ESET made to my MacBook Air. My very unscientific evaluation depended on timing how long it took to complete a few selected operations. These are timed manually with a stopwatch, so they aren’t highly accurate either, but I tried to repeat them a few times.

Let me say it again, this isn’t meant to be scientific. Yes, some of the results (like the DiskSpeed benchmark) don’t even make sense. But the main takeaway is this: with ESET installed, there is just a small nominal impact to system performance, and when you turn off the real-time scan (file system protection), the difference is practically negligible.

I think overall that’s just great.

Another nice bit is about how ESET does licensing. They call it Unilicense. Just one price for one license enables you to use the product on either Windows, Mac or Linux platform. The license is supposed to go with one hardware. This flexibility enables you to, say, dual boot multiple operating systems on the same hardware, and yet use only one license. For example, if you have Mac OS X on your Mac notebook, and you also have Windows installed via Boot Camp, then with a single ESET license, you can run both the Mac and Windows version of the software.

(With Boot Camp, you either use Mac OS X or Windows, but not both at the same time. ESET’s license is not meant, I think, to let you run in a VM environment where both the host and the guest OS share the same license, since both would have to be running at the same time.)

The Mac software license on its own, under the old pricing scheme, is actually costs less than the Windows license. It’s because the Windows version actually has more features. But this flexibility in the new scheme to switch platforms at will is really nice, and I think adequately justifies a flat license fee across all platforms.

When there’s a bundle offer, it’s even more awesome. I paid S$59 for 3 licenses for 2 years. This is pretty useful if, like most people, you have more than one computer at home. Ordinarily, just two license for one year would already have cost more than S$59.

ESET Cybersecurity for Mac works great on the Mac, although I must say that in some ways its user interface doesn’t quite behave the way you’d expect a Mac software to behave. For example, Cmd-W doesn’t close the ESET window. It’s just a minor annoyance.

Overall, ESET seems to work well. It’s good at what it does (anti-virus protection, based on comparative reviews), has a light footprint, nice flexible license, and reasonably cheap.