One would think adding in an antivirus program to an established product would be a bit of a risk. The majority of programs we have seen over the years tend to be less effective as they try to do it all. Many of you remember how great the old Nero Burning Rom used to be? It was the “must have” CD\DVD burning solution but they had to keep adding to it and adding to it until it became a bloated 300 MB download that hogged system resources. Symantec has struggled for the last few years as well to trim down the Norton Antivirus programs going as far as to say things like ”uses less system resources” as a selling point. Advanced System Care with Antivirus clocks in at 137 MB and we have more information on resource usage below.
Unlike other programs Advanced System Care is not an antivirus or antimalware program trying to do more. As a matter of fact, they did not code their own antivirus for ASC5. You have literally dozens of excellent choices in antivirus programs in both freeware and shareware so it would be foolish to spend the resources trying to incorporate a ground up antivirus into ASC5. I am sure IOBit could have done so but instead they have licensed Bitdefender which is available as freeware and shareware. Not familiar with Bitdefender? On April 14th, AV Comparatives released an updated Real World Protection Test and Bitdefender came out on top. AV Comparatives is where the geek goes to compare numbers on the best antivirus, if you didn’t know.
I have spent a couple of days playing with ASC5 beta and found it to be exactly like the ASC you are used to with a new tab for the antivirus including quick scan, full scan, custom scan and settings that you find in any antivirus program including Bitdefender. We did do a quick overview of ASC5 Pro. While the video is not brand new, it does give you an overview of the program:
Nothing is perfect however. Advanced System Care with Antivirus is in beta and I have had no issues running it on our test machines but betas are publicly released so that people can report bugs or problems back to the company. It wants to remove any antivirus already installed, which is normal since you only need one antivirus and it did so without issue but it also wanted to remove Malwarebytes Antimalware which it should play nice with, however if you are running Malwarebytes live protection I can see the conflict. It should be removed from live protection (or startup). Memory usage was between 50 and 60 megs after 48 hours of running the program. This includes the main program, antivirus, tray and service. Not too bad unless you have only 1 gig of ram with other startup programs running but if you take into account that this would be the only all-in-one tool you need running then it is within reason, especially since this will remove your current antivirus and possibly replace other system maintenance tools.
I have spoken with IOBit and both of my minor complaints are being looked into and hopefully will be addressed before this goes final. As mentioned, since this beta uses the already established ASC5 and Bitdefender antivirus I am confident that the majority of people will have no problems using it daily.
The only thing left now is the price. So far IOBit has priced their programs aggressively and Bitdefender is currently priced at $49.95 for their Antivirus. IOBit is not able to provide us a firm price as of yet but they tell me that they hope to come in at about $25 US. Considering ASC5 sells for as little as $12.97 US and BitDefender at $49.95 US this would be a great deal on this all-in-one-suite.
So, are you ready to give it a whirl? Download at http://www.majorgeeks.com/Advanced_SystemCare_with_Antivirus_2012_d7725.html .
