Deep - Heuristics detection & Analysis, Highly configurable, Great Ad-Blocking when tweaking your own blacklists, Firewall very advanced, Much better interface - many pro's.
Larger System footprint [though is a small trade off], Deeper Scan times could be faster, Needs to auto detect IM clients on default, Some settings need to be tweaked for tougher security. I don't consider these bad con's; just things to work on in future versions.
This is a great product - For all round AV Security - Protection, I am basing this knowledge on, over 12yrs experience in the AV and Security industry. Testing and playing with different AV & Security Software.
I like how you can tweak this product to be a lot tougher 'than the set and forget' features of many AV products on the market. Though this is a good thing :-)
I consider this package a better contender when it comes to customisation and preferences for the more advanced users! And yet - still it's simple enough to use for the not so advance.
The Ad - Banner blocking is wonderful, Importation of a blacklist via .txt - I love this feature, I have created an AD free experience on my Laptop, based on my own knowledge or spying and malicious websites or trackers etc.
The amount of blocking is amazing - Specially now; when you have the likes of sites, bypassing known black list blockers because they are flash based Ad's served up in Zip Archives. To try to avoid detection or origan.
I like the depth of Heuristics detection - again you can go deeper when scanning archives or packed CAB or IDX etc. files, though scan times are slow when tweaking to this level.
The firewall is Advanced - again if you know what your doing; you can add so many different custom rules and ports, get detailed traffic analysis. On the newer version v8 KIS 2009 there is the Network and Content filtering it's a cool new feature called Network Packet Filtering, wow this gives you a new wealth of knowledge.
I could keep on going when it comes to the over all features and benefits of this product, yes it does have some short falls; like quite heavy on system resources, I consider this a small price to pay for more tougher security.
I will add a full 2009 review when this entry comes available. Thanks for a great product Kaspersky!
I highly recommend. Consider it best of breed ;-)