Just yesterday we received a hard disk which was having a major virus dilemma. Our client told us that they were unable to login to the system (Windows XP) and previously experienced slowness in the system. Upon booting into Windows, the user profile loads momentarily but resets afterwards therefore unable to launch the desktop. So, we decided to install and test ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 onto our system. If you have followed our post, we actually did a review months back for the beta version of ESET NOD32 Smart Security 4.

Continuing to the case, we docked the hard disk into our Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Dock and hit up the scan function. NOD32 Antivirus 4 was able to quarantine 48 pieces of malwares. Did it managed to undo the damaged done?

Not quite so. As expected the virus had permanently altered the login data therefore we decided to repair Windows by using the Windows installation CD. After the 30 minutes re-installation, we are able to login to Windows again. However so, Windows was still under-performing. Explorer.exe was taking a huge 50% toll on the CPU usage and IEXPLORER.exe was seen in the task manager even though we did not launch the Internet Explorer application. This caused us to think that some viruses are still lurking somewhere.

We installed NOD32 on the problematic drive and hit up the scan function again. To our surprise, the previous scan did not actually remove all the viruses. A couple of them still resided on the hard disk. With the final scan and some HijackThis process, everything was back to normal.

Below was the image we captured from Process Explorer. It shows the usage pattern for “ekrn.exe” (ESET process). During scanning, ekrn.exe uses around 80% CPU usage and 44.9Mb of RAM. Otherwise during idle, NOD32 hardly degrades the CPU performances.

Overall, we like what NOD32 has to offer for an antivirus solution. For the rest of ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 features, you can view it at our previous beta review.