Walking on the Clouds - Panda Antivirus Free Cloudware

About 20 or 25 years ago (has it been that long already?), the world discovered the word 'digital'. It sounded cool, and it reminded you of something between the Terminator and Tron. Pretty soon, that word was plastered on everything - boomboxes, books and magazines, microwave ovens - just about everything. And people just lapped it up. Every age has its magic buzzword; they had 'digital' and today we have the Cloud. What is the Cloud? If you ever saw the Terminator movies, you know something about what the cloud is; it is what they called Skynet - only, not evil or self-conscious. Imagine a bunch of a million interconnected computers all over the world run by services like Google, Microsoft or Yahoo; if you drew a diagram of a million computers and interconnected them with lines, you do see that they would be such an impossible tangle, that they would look like a cloud if you looked at them from a distance, and squinted a little. Your e-mail, has always run on Cloud computing; you don't have to have an e-mail program installed on the computer; you just depend on a centralized computer somewhere else. And then there is Google Docs that tries to replace Microsoft Office; if you have a subscription to Rhapsody, you keep your music on the Cloud - you get the picture, don't you? They are figuring out how to put new things on the Cloud every day, and the latest is the Panda antivirus free Cloud-driven software. But this time, they didn't just put it on the Cloud, for the novelty value in it. There really is a good reason why the Cloud should make it more efficient than the others.

There are about 20 million viruses out there. And there are more being made by ne'er-do-wells today than ever before. Some antivirus packages have to phone home hourly to keep up with all the updates being written all the time for all those new viruses. But how much would you download before you got tired of it; and what if sometimes you don't let it upload automatically? The answer to this would be to not leave it to your hardware to download and store that bag of bricks; the antivirus company could keep it all on its own servers (the Cloud). So what is that like, the experience of using the new Cloud-driven Panda antivirus free package?

Well ,it is pretty quick to install, and updating ritual you find on all other packages, is mercifully missing on this one; Why? Because the updates are not on your local computer, they are the Cloud. Ordinary antivirus, that keeps all the updates right on your hard disk, usually takes up no more than a couple hundred megabytes. It looks like there is some serious corner-cutting going on; because the typical virus database that the antivirus companies have measure in the thousands of gigabytes. The moment you finish the install, it does a full system scan, and goes back and forth to the Panda antivirus free database on the Cloud to check that everything is shipshape. If you should launch a new program, it will stop it in its tracks, phone home to the Cloud for permission, and only allow it to launch if it clears the Panda test.

In practice, this works admirably well. It catches keystroke loggers scare ware, viruses, rootkit infections, all with above average scores, or perfect ones. Without a doubt the Panda antivirus free version is better than all other free versions barring none. And is better than almost all paid software too. It certainly slows down your computer a lot less, and it looks like we have a winner.