CA Internet Security Suite Plus 2008 Reviews

"Cover PC with assorted Means"

Pros:
Easy to use, covers all the bases and has won several awards.

Cons:
Firewall is not strong enough; Help features and support are not good. It does not include antiphishing, antirootkit and basic IM protection.

The Bottom Line:
As a top rated net security, CA Internet Security Suite 2007 (CAISS 2007) has solid detection and removal capabilities on viruses, trojans, worms and some spyware. Unfortunately it is a resource (RAM) hog like many other antivirus apps – such as Norton. If you want a fast and light net security, NOD32 is definitely the best choice.

Features:
As we all known, there are many traps on Internet; we cannot pay too much attention to it. CAISS 2007 as a famous antivirus suite offers many powerful functions to prevent our PC from infection, it includes a personal firewall and antivirus, antispyware, and antispam protection. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide antiphishing, antirootkit and basic IM protection, while most of it competitors does provide.

To the antivirus, you have wait a while to start scannging, and when this process is abort by yourself, the CA Internet Security window indicate that we had finished our antivirus scan and certify us as protected. With this bug, our PC would be infected by the viruses it lets slip.

In this version, CAISS starts to use its own personal firewall (used to be ZoneAlarm firewall). Some functions maybe a little distempered, this firewall could not well block Internet threats.

As for antispyware protection, it works well, however, sometimes it may find many “threats” which may be not the spyware, if you delete them, some related programs would not work normally. There is a worse condition, if you not remove or quarantine any of the potential spyware items CAISS found, CAISS’s overview window will also says your system is now fully protected. This easy false will confuse the users whether their PC is well protected or not.

CAISS does provide the function of antispam; Outlook and Outlook Express is the main objects it protects, there is almost no settings you could tweak.

In my opinion, to this version, the products are not integrated well, and some important functions are not provided.

Set up:
To download and install CAISS, you have to submit your email and physical address and get through some bored steps. There is no third party programs combine with the setup file. Parental Controls, which is a separate feature only runs on Windows 2000 and XP, install it according to your OS.

To uninstall this program is a challenge, many users complains that it is hard to remove the entire program, some useless folders still left in your PC after reboot.

Interface:
The main panel is divided into 4 blocks, including CA-Antivirus, CA-Antispyware, CA-Firewall, and CA-Antispam. When you click individual topics, there appears a new window with more specifics about the topic selected. This seems out of fashion, and not convenient.

Many popular antivirus utilities contain all activities within one window, the left is the navigation for all tools, and the right is a panel for system status. This is accepted by most users, so, if CA could not offers a more convenient GUI, at least, it should catch up with its competitors.

System Requirements:
It requires 60MB to install and 256MB of RAM to run on Windows 98 through XP. Parental Controls, which is a separate feature, requires an additional 25MB of hard drive space to install and only runs on Windows 2000 and XP. If your OS is Windows Vista, you have to update first.

Conclusion:
There are some flaws in this version, if the designers could solve all the problems in the next version; CA Internet Security Suite 2007 is still a good choice to protect your PC.