When you consider antivirus, you don’t have a tendency to consider its look. Sometimes, your concern is that the AV works and isn’t too onerous to determine to out. With Panda Dome Premium, nevertheless, you may’t assist however take into consideration its seems to be.
Much like Microsoft’s Bing homepage, Panda Dome options a lovely background picture, with the interface parts positioned on high of it. It’s an attention-grabbing various to the same old flat, primary-color AV interfaces, and would possibly take getting used to. However the picture doesn’t obscure any of the necessary elements of the UI.
That’s good, as a result of Panda Dome Premium is chock-full of options, all of which get their very own tile on the first interface.
In fact, a ton of options comes with a better value than most providers. Panda Dome Premium prices $93 per yr for a single machine for brand new subscribers, with a daily value of $155 yearly. Panda’s 10-device subscription (a staple providing of AV) is $158 for the primary yr, with a daily value of $263. That’s far dearer than different huge title suites.
Observe: This evaluation is a part of our finest antivirus roundup. Go there for particulars about competing merchandise and the way we examined them.
IDGPanda Dome Premium’s default view.
Options
Earlier variations of Panda, resembling Panda Gold Safety, tried to cram quite a lot of options right into a tiled interface with a number of pages. In Panda Dome Premium, the entire fundamental options are listed in a single scrolling checklist of iOS app-like icons. If a characteristic is lively there’s an “ON” badge within the upper-right nook of its icon.
The primary icon within the dashboard is Scan. Click on that and a smaller window opens up with three choices: Essential areas, Full scan, and Customized scan. The final two choices are self-explanatory, whereas Essential areas scans reminiscence, operating processes, browser cookies, and different knowledge for malware. It’s good, simple, and easy.
Going again to the first interface, the Antivirus icon is the place you may see details about your newest scan, quarantined information, and scheduled scans.
Panda has additionally added an replace supervisor that searches for updates to your apps and Home windows itself. Various different suites embody a characteristic like this, however we’re not completely satisfied it’s crucial as most updates to Home windows and apps are automated anyway.
Subsequent up is PC cleanup, which oddly will get a spot of prominence in Panda Dome. This can be a widespread “additional” that top-level safety suites have, with instruments like a disk defragmenter, onerous drive cleaner, and a startup apps supervisor. All of those options are both inbuilt to Home windows 10 or you will get them free of charge with a third-party utility, however if you need them multi functional spot, Panda supplies that.
Panda Dome Premium features a VPN that gives limitless bandwidth and 23 totally different nation places powered by Hotspot Defend.
A premium antivirus suite with a premium value deserves premium service, and Panda Dome delivers that with dwell, 24/7 tech assist that may make it easier to with every kind of technical points together with printer, router, and smartphone points.
IDGPanda Dome’s Wi-Fi Safety characteristic.
The suite additionally provides a ransomware monitor referred to as Knowledge Defend that’s not enabled by default. There’s not a lot to this. Flip it on, comply with the wizard to specify the folders that ought to be protected, and away you go.
One other notable characteristic is Wi-Fi Safety. As we’ve seen with many sensible dwelling monitoring options from the likes of Eset and Bullguard, Panda’s Wi-Fi Safety enables you to see what’s occurring together with your community. It isn’t fairly as consumer pleasant as the opposite providers because it simply lists gadgets by IP tackle and producer as a substitute of machine title. It could get slightly extra consumer pleasant over time because the sensible dwelling pattern grows.
IDGPanda Dome can assess your router’s safety.
Essentially the most attention-grabbing characteristic of Wi-Fi Safety is its near-immediate auditing of the safety stage to your router. My dwelling router popped up as “medium safety,” for instance, with a useful guidelines about what was occurring. Panda preferred my stage of authentication and encryption, community title, and advert hoc community safety.
It advisable that I modify the “connection mode” to one thing safer since mine was computerized. It then directed me to click on a hyperlink to get extra data. Once I clicked on the hyperlink, nevertheless, Panda directed me to a assist web page with no related data for taking a deeper dive, however there was additionally a “configure router” hyperlink that took me to my router login.
It appears to me that most individuals will find yourself with a medium safety ranking, due to their router’s connection mode. Panda’s assist web page for Wi-Fi Safety even reveals a router with the identical outcomes as mine. It could’ve been useful if Panda simply stated one thing like that proper within the report card, resembling, “This router has medium stage safety. That is fairly widespread and possibly nothing to fret about, however in case you are involved click on right here to study extra.” Then present some actionable data behind the “study extra” hyperlink.
There are such a lot of options in Panda Dome Premium that we merely can’t cowl all of them right here. One other good one is named Course of Monitor. That is a take a look at what’s operating in your PC proper now. On the high you may see what number of processes are being executed, what number of want the web, and if there are any processes that could be a menace.
IDGPanda Dome Premium’s Course of Monitor.
Below that may be a checklist of the latest processes found, with an choice to view a report back to get all the data you may ever need about operating processes. The expanded checklist reveals which processes are digitally signed, whether or not they’re protected, and what number of HTTP connections they’ve. It’s all very simple to learn and perceive, and it’s additionally a good way to get misplaced in PC nerdom for a short while.
Panda Dome Premium additionally has a USB-drive scanning characteristic that we’ve seen in different safety suites. By default this characteristic will ask if you wish to scan a thumb drive or exterior onerous drive.
There are a number of different options, together with an software management characteristic to limit which packages might be executed in your PC, a tool location characteristic referred to as Anti-Theft, parental management, and a built-in Cloud Drive that permits you to sync information simply as you’ll with Dropbox and OneDrive.
IDGPanda Dome Premium’s Rescue Equipment.
Two options that significantly stand out are Rescue Equipment and the Digital Keyboard. Rescue Equipment is for coping with superior virus issues. It enables you to create a restoration drive besides your PC after which disinfect the PC. This ought to be accomplished forward of time or on a non-infected PC. If that’s not an possibility, there’s the superior virus detector that makes use of Panda Cloud Cleaner—a virus-scanning app that may run on the desktop or off a USB stick—to take a deeper dive into your PC {hardware}.
Digital Keyboard is a software program keyboard you use together with your mouse. It’s supposed to stop any potential keyloggers put in in your system from siphoning bank card particulars or delicate logins whilst you sort them in.
If that’s not sufficient, every icon has its personal settings the place you may tweak numerous choices for all of Panda Dome’s options.
Efficiency
At this writing, solely AV-Comparatives had checked out Panda in current months. The testing group checked out Panda Free, however sometimes the dearer suites use the identical or related detection engines.
In AV-Comparatives’ real-world safety check for July by way of October 2020 the suite blocked 100% of the 758 check circumstances, with 33 false positives. That’s loads, however each suite scoring 100% had excessive false positives. These suites that scored barely decrease, within the vary of 99.7 to 99.8 %, usually had decrease false positives.
Within the malware safety check for September 2020, Panda blocked 99.89 % of greater than 10,000 samples, with 0.11 % compromises and 114 false positives. These are the safety scores we additionally noticed two years in the past. This time round, nevertheless, the false positives have been considerably decrease.
IDGPanda Dome Premium provides a ton of options.
For our in-house checks, Panda was 20 factors decrease within the PCMark 10 Prolonged check than the check PC with no third-party antivirus put in. The check rig scored 1,658 earlier than Panda was put in, and 1,638 after set up and a full disk scan.
For the Handbrake check and the archiving check, there was no change in efficiency between with and with out Panda put in. Unarchiving took about 15 seconds longer, whereas file transfers have been barely quicker.
That’s fairly a combined bag, however given the PC Mark scores we wouldn’t be shocked if decrease finish machines did really feel an impression with Panda Dome Premium put in.
Conclusion
Panda Dome Premium provides a ton of options along with the same old malware safety and real-time scanning. These additional options are nearly an excessive amount of for the common consumer, even on this simplified consumer interface. Should you’re an influence consumer, nevertheless, all these bells and whistles are probably interesting. Primarily based on our checks, your efficiency ought to be positive.
The one sticking level with Panda is that it’s costly. You do get loads for that value, however you may positively get antivirus safety that’s simply as extremely rated at a greater value.
Editor’s be aware: As a result of on-line providers are sometimes iterative, gaining new options and efficiency enhancements over time, this evaluation is topic to alter with the intention to precisely mirror the present state of the service. Any adjustments to textual content or our remaining evaluation verdict might be famous on the high of this text.
