Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Rising PC Doctor 7 Review

 Its time for another security software review. Today I will be review Rising PC Doctor a free PC Security aid from Rising Security.

 Now Rising PC Doctor is a program I have used in the past. However version 7 (finally) added support for Windows 7 and gave a UI a much needed overhaul. First I must explain what Rising PC Doctor is, however explaining it is very complex because its a little bit of everything. Rising PC Doctor does an "audit" of your computer security checking if any AVs are installed, it has a USB protection program, offers to cleanup junk files, has a cloud powered process manager, gives an over view of what runs on boot, offers to scan for software vulnerabilities, and to top it all off has a Cloud AntiTrojan scanner.

 After installation finishes the first thing Rising PC Doctor does is run a security audit. This audit does contain a cloud anti-trojan scan of the system. On my Vista laptop (which is not new) I think the audit took between 5-10mins it did not give a very clear explanation of what it was doing but once I got into the UI it told me on the last audit my pc got an 80 with one issue. However I was not able to get to where what that problem was but I think it was due to some junk files. Rising also preformed a Cloud Anti-Trojan scan which found nothing on my system. Which is good because that machine was clean so no FP's on a wide range of programs I have installed over the ages. Its important to note the Anti-Trojan system does not have any real time protection so it should not be your first line of defense.

  Rising in the background runs about four processes totaling 15 MBs and using very little CPU. Rising is made in China so don't be alarmed when you load up task manager and notice that a few of the processes descriptions are in Chinese. Personally I think it may be a good idea for a later build to put those in English not to alarm anyone but its not that big of a deal. Rising did not detect Panda Cloud being installed in the AV monitoring part of the application and informed me I should install Rising AV to prevent viruses. I ignored that and sent them an email informing them of this so we shall see if they respond about that. The processes manager is my favorite part of the application. It informs you of Risings Cloud Security rating of the process which is pretty cool it also gives connection information. That StartUp manager database of programs that could be disabled is not very large yet with American programs but I figure that will be corrected eventually. I use to use the USB protection tool in v6 and did what it needed to do well.

 The biggest question is where does Rising fit in to your security setup? It does a little bit of everything however it had two strong points for me which is why I kept it installed. The Cloud AntiTrojan does not conflict with other AV programs so I am going to use it as a backup scanner for all my machines. Also the Cloud Task Manager was very impressive so I will keep it incase a family members gets a malware infection and I need to end a process.