Kaspersky Anti-Virus has been our AV product of choice for over a year – and, wisely, this new version doesn’t tinker too much with the established formula.

The most visible change is the updated interface. It’s cleaner than earlier versions, with just a few buttons and some pretty activity graphs. It’s the most approachable Kaspersky yet, with expert features hidden away under a “Settings” button.

Under the bonnet purrs an updated virus-scanning engine, designed to make use of multiple CPU cores to speed up security scans. It’s also the first version of Kaspersky to use whitelisting, thanks to a deal with enterprise security specialist Bit9. This lets it skip over legitimate applications without wasting resources on scanning them.

Thankfully, these new features haven’t bloated the package. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 added just one second to the time it took our test system to boot to the Vista desktop, though hard disk and CPU activity continued for a further 19 seconds. Once up and running it had a 46MB RAM footprint – modest by the standards of commercial AV packages.

Of course, a lightweight scan is worthless if malware slips through the net. But in our tests Kaspersky kept its crown with excellent detection results: against a selection of current malware it caught every single dialler, hijack and Trojan. It missed only three samples, none of them critical: two were free applications that launch unwanted pop-ups and the third was a child-protection package that could, in theory, be used for malicious spying.

Once up and running Kaspersky had a 46MB RAM footprint – modest by the standards of commercial AV packages.

Note, however, that by default Kaspersky Anti-Virus doesn’t scan for all potentially unwanted programs – we had to manually enable full scanning for adware as well as malware.

As is common these days, the program can also identify activity that looks suspicious even if it isn’t recognised as a threat, and send details back to the company’s labs. That’s optional, though – Kaspersky recognises that not everyone wants to share their experiences with Moscow.

On the downside, the interface can be quirky. Drop-down menus, for example, change their contents depending on other settings – a big usability no-no. Configuration options can be obscure, too: you get tick-boxes for options such as “iSwift” and “iChecker” but you’ll have to delve into the Help files to find out what they mean.

It feels pushier than before, too. The move from version numbers to a year-based system suggests Kaspersky is hoping to get users onto an upgrade conveyor belt. And we couldn’t help but notice the panels within the interface detailing various extra features in the full Kaspersky Internet Security suite.
But ultimately Kaspersky’s foibles are no worse than its competitors’, and its detection abilities remain exceptional.