Panda Cloud Antivirus – Free Antivirus for Windows

Panda Cloud Antivirus was recently taken out of beta and released to the public.  Personally, I’ve been using Microsoft Security Essentials since its release, but I thought I’d try out Panda to see how it works.  I have to say that the performance of Panda is much better considering that it does most of its processing in the cloud.

What Panda Cloud Antivirus does is it scans certain files like documents on the local machine, while it scans executables and other such files in the cloud.  This maintains some privacy, but they guarantee us that our privacy will not be compromised with any of the files that are sent to them for scanning.  If you want, you can sign up with some bogus email.

The only downside that I’ve heard of with Panda is that it can have longer scan times for a full scan.  I did a quick scan and it was pretty quick.  I’ll be using it more for the next few days at least to see how it does.  The only thing that I wish it had was a scheduled scan option.