Robo Antivirus is a brand new free antivirus out today. Some of the antivirus’s strengths are that it uses very little memory and is a very small download. The program even has a real time shield to protect against rouge process. The program runs on the .net frame work and even works with 64 bit versions of Windows 7.
The installation of Robo Antivirus 2011 was very fast. The download was a tiny 1.7 megabytes. This is amazing considering that it includes features close to what a mainstream antivirus has which can run upwards of 100 megabytes for just the download. One problem I encountered is that the program doesn’t install itself as a service. It seems that once the program is closed, protection also shuts down. Therefore, it is crucial to minimize the program rather than exiting out.
The scanning process of Robo Antivirus is ok. There is the quick and custom scan option. However, once one clicks the button to scan their computer, it doesn’t move on to the next screen. Therefore its confusing whether the scan actually started or not. Also, once a virus scan is started there is no button to pause or stop it; one has to physically exit the program. Scanning is very slow at only about 400 kilobytes per second. Almost all other antivirus that I have tested have achieved at least 2 megabytes per second. Therefore, to scan a modest 7,800 files it took about 1 hour. There is a quarantine but there appears no way to restore files. The program also didn’t detect any viruses on the test computer.
Another problem with Robo Antivirus 2011 is its resource usage. While the program is idle it uses approximately 9 % CPU power. I believe this is because the real time shield really needs to be revamped to ensure efficient CPU usage. To the programs credit, the memory footprint is quite low at only 12 megabytes.
Robo Antivirus includes a few more features. The disk shredder appears to over write files for privacy. However, there is no indication how many passes it makes. There is also a customer support feature. It clear that this program is in beta if not the alpha stage. However, I am excited to see new developments to come.
