Digital Patrol is a relatively new free antivirus that simply does what is suppose to do; detect viruses and Trojans. The program offers a very basic interface but a very robust engine. The program’s virus database contains over 2,200,000 virus definitions and has auto update capability. The program also offers a real time shield. The company claims that the program can detect 100% of Trojans in the wild. This is a pretty bold claim that even Symantec and McAfee haven’t publically stated (probably for liability reasons).
The installation of Digital Patrol was easy. The only downside is that the program download is almost 32 megabytes in size. I personally feel that is kind of large given that the program doesn’t include a very robust interface.
Digital Patrol offers two forms of protection a standard definition and heuristic based protection. As stated before, there are quite a bit of virus definitions loaded on board. The publisher states that the program has auto and pulse updates that look for definition updates every two hours. However, this doesn’t seem to be used in practice as the publisher’s website states that the last update was released on 9th of December while today is the 11th.
The scanning speed of Digital Patrol can’t really be described as “quick†when compared with competitors. On the test system, after scanning for 1 hour, the scan was approximately 50% done. According to Windows Resource Monitor, Digital Patrol scanned from 2 to 3 megabytes per second. Resource usage during a scan also isn’t ideal. The program requires 185 megabytes of memory and approximately 8 to 11 percent CPU power on the test system. These statistics are below the average free antivirus competitor.
One area where Digital Patrol excels is virus detection. Since I frequently scan the same test system with different antivirus engines, it’s nice to see one detect viruses that have been missed by others. The virus I am talking about is related to wifi penetration testing. While it may not necessarily be considered a virus the program could be defined as malicious. Few free antivirus have successfully detected this program.
