The unusually named NOD32 is finding favour with a growing number of users despite its Spartan interface, which concentrates more on the nuts and bolts of the job at hand than trying to look good.


NOD offers three installation options - typical, which is suitable for the home user; advanced for the intermediate user; and expert for the system administrator. The typical installation requires basic details of your internet connection and gives you the option of turning the resident virus protection on each time you launch Windows.
It's difficult to do much wrong, even when the program asks if you use proxy servers it provides an 'I don't know' option and will automatically seek the information from your existing browser setup.


Once NOD is installed and you have rebooted, its presence is signified by a flash screen that appears on launch until boot up is complete and then a small icon on the taskbar which signifies NOD is working. Double clicking on it opens the NOD Control Center, which at first glance will confuse many home users with its 'Resident modules and filters' - AMON, which is the standard background protection that should already be running; IMON, which monitors internet activity; and NOD32, which you use for manual scanning.


While it does not hurt to become familiar with the workings of the Control Center, most users don't need to go near it if they have correctly installed NOD32 using the 'Typical' installation option.


NOD32 picked up a decent 87.75 percent of the test files, including all of the viruses and worms. While NOD32 does not include a firewall, be careful about running it with the likes of Norton Internet Security - even without the Norton AntiVirus module - as it will constantly tell you that NIS is a virus.