Xyovs is a free antivirus that offers the basics of computer protection. What’s nice is that the security is all provided in an extremely compact package. The download with an included installer is only a minuscule two megabytes in size. This includes the full antivirus engine and up to date virus definitions. Also, Xyovs doesn’t solely depend on definitions but also a complete heuristic or behavior engine. Since Xyovs is a newer antivirus, it also lacks in some areas. I feel that more work could have been done on the interface and more features could have been implemented.
I first tired to install Xyovs on the 64 bit test system. This failed with a message stating that the driver could not be loaded. The clue was that the program was trying to install vcredist_x86.exe. One will notice the “x86†which means that the program was designed for 32 bit systems. Therefore, rather than getting an error message it would have been nice for the installer to at least scan the system version before creating the problem. Once on a 32bit machine, Xyvos started immediately.
The first thing about Xyvos free antivirus is that it is very basic. There actually is no full system or quick scan option, rather the program relies completely on real-time behavior protection. Xyvos scans active processes and monitors suspicious events. When a malicious one is found, it is added to the “Manage Trusted†list. There, one can modify whether to trust or ignore a process. There are bound to be many entry’s in this list as the protection looks for “suspicious†files that could be viruses, not definite viruses via a concrete definition.
Xyovs’s resource usage is very good. The program uses 6 megabytes of memory and zero percent CPU power to provide active protection. Also, the impact on performance is undetectable. Therefore Xyovs has some of the best resource management compared to its free competitors.
The program also includes a few additional features. They are a nice logging capability, USB protection, Anti-Keylogger, spyware protection, sensitivity levels, and auto updates. Unfortunately, there is no manual update function which is annoying.
Xyovs free antivirus is a nice program but it begs the question why should one choose it over a main stream program. Free AVG and many others already include excellent heuristic detection plus the added protection of definitions.
