13. G-Data Total Care 2009: The Heavy Weight Of Security

Ranking first in our evaluation from last year, G-Data’s various permutations carve out a solid reputation for the company in the area of information protection. We were intrigued, therefore, to test out the newest security product from G-Data. 

A Sober and Functional Interface

Here, the importance was put on efficiency. Sobriety and clarity have definitely been privileged–the color palette contains only red, white, and different shades of gray, so that the different functions are immediately identifiable and easily accessible. The only exception to this color-coded rule comes in the form of a green color used to indicate activated functions. The graphics of certain other offerings are definitely more impressive, but the effect here is very positive.

The default settings are well thought out and the possibilities for personalization are very complete. It is a shame, however, that if you use the default settings, only files that are less than 300 KB in size are checked. In practice, it is easy to modify this setting, but when would such an option ever really be practical or appropriate? The impossibility of password protection is another deplorable aspect of this program.

A Superlative Performance

Despite the variety of threats used during our test, we could not find fault with the detection motor of G-Data during the hard drive scans. Only McAfee did nearly as well.

If one looks at the general protection, this German anti-virus system takes the cake. Indeed, we couldn’t find any problems with the resident protection either. The real time shield acted two times: the first time during the opening of the folder then again during the opening of the files in the case where a threat had survived. During the insertion of a USB or other external storage device, a scan was also put into action. Additionally, despite the absence of a control bar, infected email attachments were neutralized whilst the email itself remained readable. Everything is done here for the protection of the computer, which leads to an important mobilization of the power of the system.

Performance Issues During Scans

The additional time needed for starting up Windows is acute, inferior to that of its direct competition (+23%). As with the other software that we tested, no deceleration of the system due to frequent access to the system was measured.

The duration of the complete scan is average, but the system’s power is largely given over to the scan, which greatly affects the processor (whose capacity was used up completely in our case) and the memory (almost 180 MB, or 378 MB if one adds together the use of the RAM memory and the swap file). The uninstall process works well, as G-Data leaves 16 keys in the register at the end of the operation.

Conclusion

The quality of protection is without contest and G-Data offers a markedly more complete protection than the others in its category do. Its price is competitive, which is even less than the average cost of the software in this comparison, and the additional software delivered with it is complete without being exhaustive.

However, this performance leads to a very significant use of your system’s power and we definitely advise that you use G-Data on more recent computers (with multi-core processors and at least 2 GB of Ram) if you do not want the hard drive scan to put your machine completely out of commission.