Baidu Antivirus 2015
Baidu Antivirus 2013 is light on system resources yet big on protection, fast, and free forever. Up-and-comer Baidu’s antivirus solution protects your system with Baidu Antivirus and Cloud Security Engines and Avira Antivirus Engine. Baidu Antivirus can be customized to favor speed or protection, and it runs happily alongside other antivirus programs — both uncommon traits. Baidu Antivirus 2013 (version 3.6.2) runs in Windows XP to 8.
After installing Baidu Antivirus, we did three things: verified that it played well with our existing tools (it did), updated its definitions (they were), and scanned our system. Baidu Antivirus offers Quick, Full, and Custom scans. The Quick scan is very fast, indeed; fast enough to scan at boot without slowing your PC much. Custom scans can include portable devices. The Full scan takes about as much time as other programs, and it finds more, too, though it returned a false positive on a firewire driver. But six others were smelly enough to toss on the safe side. We opened the Settings and clicked “Virus Scan,” where we could select file types to scan and exclude, choose actions upon detection, and exclude or set size limits on archived files. Under Engine Options, we could set Low, Normal, and High detection levels to vary the impact of scans on system performance and also enable or disable Avira Engine with separate checkboxes for real-time protection and virus scan. We could also set options for some extra features, such as USB and Download Protection and Proactive Defense. Quarantine, Exclusion, and Log features all open from the main screen.
Baidu Antivirus 2013 impressed us with its speed and depth of coverage. It’s a better choice for experienced users due to its options and because its deep scans can return false positives that beginners might overlook. We’ll be watching Baidu’s antivirus offering with interest!