The name of this product has its origins in Czech television. NOD in the Czech language translates to "Hospital on the Edge of the Disk" after a early eighties Czech television programme called "Hospital on the Edge of the City". There are many a variety of medical metaphors applied to the world of anti-virus software.
On installation the product required us to register it on a website before it would update the virus database. The printed documentation that accompanied the software was thin and mildly useful. The electronic version was slightly more enlightening as it went into what was new in this version.
Among those improvements is a better looking GUI, which is certainly true as it does look very slick and professional. However we did notice a significant performance downgrade which twice resulted in having to restart the test machine. As always this gave us a chance to test the support facilities of the vendor. The website did not seem to harbour any information in the form of a knowledge base to quickly solve a problem. There was a page where we could submit details of our problem and within the hour we had a reply from support offering a solution which worked! Full marks there then.
We had to upgrade parts of the software which were causing some compatibility problem. Once upgraded the problem went away but while support said that the new version was v. 2.000.8/9, the software still reported it as 1.601, which we thought looked odd.
That said, the software is very quick to scan a system's hard drive and email scanning is reasonably fast too for both POP3 and IMAP-type email servers. Overall the software does a good job and has the flexibility to suit both novice and expert.
