Advanced System Protector is one program that I haven’t heard of until writing this review. It seems the software was released in March 2009 and has slowly gaining recognition. The software has now ranked # 35 on the top spyware removers on Cnet.
The download for the software was very compact at only 22 megabytes. The installer also completed very quickly. One downside to the install was there didn’t seem to be an option to change the installation folder.
Advanced System Protector immediately started the update process upon launch. The program that was supplied by download.com hadn’t been updated since February 2010. Therefore, a tedious virus and spyware definition update process ensued. The program first had to download a 6 megabyte package and then automatically restart the program. Next, Advanced System Protection needed to download the actual definitions. The files were 72 megabytes in size. If one has a slow connection, this process could significantly slow down the start first virus and spyware scan.
The first thing that one will notice with Advanced System Protector Personal is there is no real time protection. One will have to purchase the full version to get this functionality. One annoying thing is that there are plenty of advertisements alerting the user of this fact.
During idle operation, Advanced System Protector used a whopping 357 megabytes of RAM. Once a quick scan or fully system scan is activated the program uses as much as 400 megabytes of ram and 13 percent CPU power. This is by far the highest amount of RAM that I have seen utilized by a free antivirus program.
The quick scan is pretty fast and scanned over 400,000 locations in about 5 minutes time. Advanced System Protector detected two malware traces, a statcounter cookie and an adware trace called adware.wnwb which carried a risk level high risk rating. This is the first time that I have detected malware on my computer in quite a while; hence, I review antivirus programs. Therefore, I congratulate Advanced System Protector on it’s excellent detection capabilities. The software also has a quarantine function and successfully neutralized the detected threats.
Advanced System Protector Personal provides a few other features. There is an option to schedule scans, exclusion lists, and tune finer settings such as auto start etc. Advanced System Protector Personal provides excellent protection in a sort of Webroot manner.
