Panda Antivirus Platinum - 2006

Disliking Norton products after bad experiences in the past led me to suggest Panda to a client. I duly installed the paid-for version on 3 machines and left feeling something bad was about to happen

I was right. Panda slowed the Dell laptops down to a crawl, making them basically unresponsive. Printing continued to work OK, as did Internet access, but connections to networked file servers just stopped

OK, Panda includes a firewall. Disable that and the network access will come back, right? Not a bit of it

One long call to Panda support revealed 3 things:

1 - the product, as shipped on CD, is out of date. That's normal but I couldn't serialise it as the client had mistakenly ordered just one copy

2 - the product, as shipped, has known faults. Nothing new here either, except that they couldn't reproduce the known faults and couldn't fix them

3 - the product protects against unknown threats. Unknown threats - like using a fileserver. I got the Dubya feling here - it protects against unknown threats, but are they known unknowns or unknown unknowns? Somehow I couldn't see this product dealing with either eventuality

As a final test I took a brand new laptop and set it up. Windows XP, nice & shiny. Nice & quick. Installed Panda, rebooted... and waited. Called tech support, disabled QoS, rebooted... and waited. Disabled unknown unknowns, rebooted... and waited. With boot times stretching into minutes I could almost hear the expensive support call clocking up yet more bills for my client

Finally I hung up the phone, deleted Panda and reinstalled Windows. Not sure what I'm going to tell the client yet

My rating: Out of 100 I'd score this product at about -150. Probably the worst piece of software I've ever used