Panda Cloud Antivirus, the Best Free Antivirus for Windows 7!

This is a review of Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition 1.0, which won Editor’s Choice award for Best Free Antivirus from PC World.

Panda Cloud Antivirus

Panda Cloud Antivirus is the first FREE cloud-based antivirus. It connects in real-time to Panda Lab’s online database for protection against virus and malware.

Therefore, Panda Cloud Antivirus could detect the latest virus faster than the traditional signature-based antivirus.

And, it does NOT need to download updates, because the virus signature database is online!

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Installation

Panda Cloud Antivirus is a lightweight antivirus. The download size is only 21.9MB. The installation is very simple, all you need to do is click on the big “ACCEPT and INSTALL” button and you are done.

Install Panda Cloud Antivirus
To launch Panda Cloud Antivirus, you need to sign in your Panda Cloud Antivirus account. You can create your free account here.


Simple user interface
The main window of Panda Cloud Antivirus is very simple. By default, it shows current security status.

Beside the Status button, there are only 3 other buttons on the window: Settings, Scan, and Report.

For “Settings”, you can set enable/disable automatic management of possible viruses and send anonymous information to Panda.

Under “Scan”, there is only a big “Quick scan” button to do full system scan, and another smaller button to scan selected folders/files.

Panda Cloud Antivirus – Report
The “Report” shows all the detected threats in the last month, last week, last day, or all.

A small blue color “Recycle Bin” icon is at the bottom right for you to recover a false positive.


Virus scan performance
Panda Cloud Antivirus uses only less than 500KB memory when idle in background. When scanning, it only uses around 8MB of RAM and almost no CPU resource! Very impressive!

Panda Cloud Antivirus – Quick Scan
The first full system Quick Scan took around 23 mins to scan 18,424 files (10GB).

According to PC Mag review, Panda Cloud Antivirus is “extremely effective at keeping malware out of a clean system” but “failed to remove huge amounts of malware traces from threats it detected” (but still better than other free antivirus software).


My two cents
If you do not want to pay for an antivirus software, Panda Cloud Antivirus is the simple, lightweight, effective free antivirus for you.


Download Panda Cloud Antivirus