Pros

• CA Antivirus has an impressive Parental Control feature which allows you to easily tweak it.
• Is set to run on its own with little interference, enabling you to use your PC as normal while it does its job

Cons

• Has a high resource usage which can cause your PC to slowdown during scanning and updating
• You can get a better antivirus program for the same price

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CA Antivirus is a good antivirus software package which is published by Computer Associates. It has an impressive interface that is right up there with the competition. It has several unique features like Parental Control and Online Storage that make it very effective at total online protection. Although it is not one of the top antivirus software packages because of its high resource usage and lacklustre antispyware feature, it is a pretty good consumer-level desktop solution.

We’ve tested some of its features and capabilities like Installation, ease of use, effectiveness and updates, and we’ve included the results below.

Installation

CA Antivirus has two installation choices; standard and customised installation, and whichever you choose, the process will not take longer than 6 minutes. The wizard is simple to follow and whether you are an experienced or novice user, you’ll find it all simple and straightforward.

Ease of Use

It has a simple, straightforward interface that doesn’t take much to comprehend. Performing manual scans and updates is as simple as clicking a button and settings can be adjusted easily. Maintaining CA Antivirus is an effortless process and like other antivirus programs you can just set and forget, and let it do its job. It scans files as they are opened and doesn’t cause PC slowdown in the process.

Effectiveness

CA antivirus is quite disappointing in effectiveness, and its combined reactive and proactive score was a low 33.2%, far below other antivirus programs. It recently failed the most recent VB100% test for Windows Vista, although it received the VB100% test for Windows XP, meaning that it located and blocked 100% in-the-wild viruses. It is a decent antivirus program, but it is just not up to the industry standard in effectiveness.

Updates

Updates are provided every day regularly and can be specifically scheduled. But it hasn’t implemented “push” updates that are necessary in this day of millions of harmful threats.

More can be done to improve CA Antivirus as it has a high resource usage and a low level of protection. It however does have some impressive features like Parental Control and Online Storage that aren’t found in many antivirus applications.