Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 Review

21st February 2005

I'd used Panda Antivirus Titanium 2004 for about a year - it was bundled with a new PC, and found it quite a decent anti-virus application that stopped viruses effectively, and was useful when used in conjunction with other applications such as ZoneAlarm and Eudora.

So, naturally when the renewal data came up for the product, I decided to renew and upgrade to Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005, on the principle that the previous version had been pretty good, so the next one should be better.

Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 comes with a variety of features, including a firewall and various heuristic tools, instant messaging protection and active scanning of SMTP/POP3 sessions to protect email.

It sounds impressive, and it would be if it worked. But, in fact the problem with Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 is that it doesn't work and if you try to contact technical support, well, there isn't any.

There are several problems with Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005, and the first one is that it doesn't allow you to pick up your email. In my particular configuration, I'm running Eudora on Windows XP SP2 with ZoneAlarm as the firewall. Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 tries to scan email as it comes in via the POP3 session, and most of the time it screws up your mail collection. There is no way to disable this feature. This isn't just limited to Eudora, but a search around the web shows that the same thing happens with many different mail clients. To reliably pick up your email you have to switch Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 off which poses a security threat.

Another problem is Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005's behaviour if it actually finds a virus. Detection seems to be pretty good, but then Panda tries to use 100% of the clock cycles for some unknown reason, slowing your computer down to a crawl and forcing a reboot. In some case, the Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 application uses so many proccessory cycles that the machine has to be powered off with a resulting loss of work.

It's also an unreliable program in general use, with components often crashing during normal operation. If you need to shut down Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 to pick up your email, then there's a 50/50 chance that it might start up again later.. or not.

We appreciate that many applications don't work quite the way you'd expect, but usually this is fixable. However, in the case of Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 the online support is woeful with very few articles of any relevance. You could always log a call with technical support detailing your problem, but it's unlikely you'll get a response. You certainly won't get a refund, even though a good look around the web shows that this product is often unfit for the purpose that it was intended to do.

All-in-all Panda Titanium Antivirus 2005 is a rotten product that is so unreliable that you may have to disable it. Panda's technical support is non-existant. This probably explains why they give the application away free in the first place!