Microsoft Security Essentials v. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free

[Vilmis]

nsm0220 you look like a bot. Writing the same without arguments..

[nsm0220]

am not a bot

[mdfareez]

well nsm0220, your posts are starting to get irritating, with baseless arguments.

[pranaygtr]

It's understandable though, as Panda Cloud AV Free has

Behavioral blocking
of new & unknown threats

Source: Panda Cloud AV Comparison

[bogdan]

I think any cloud AV needs behavior blocking. A cloud AV can't send all your files to the cloud as this will be impractical (large amount of data to send) so it must send some hashes or whatever (small "fingerprints" of your files) and compare them against a database. A polymorphic virus (a virus with self-modifying program code) would be undetected by a cloud AV, as its code changes every time (and so does its fingerprint). So when a program tries to modify its own code the antivirus must react, block it and send it to the cloud for a deeper analysis.
Security Essentials also detects programs on your computer that might be malicious or harmful:

A new class of heuristic signatures leverages Microsoft’s dynamic translation technology to emulate the behavior of a program before it runs. Microsoft Security Essentials uses these signatures to look for signs of suspicious behavior, characteristics that are similar to known malware and other abnormal operations, and then queries the Dynamic Signature Service to see if the program should be submitted for analysis or terminated.

The quote is from Microsoft Security Essentials Reviewers Guide (link to doc file.)
In conclusion, I think the behavior blocking in Panda Cloud, at this point, is meant to overcome normal limitations of cloud AVs and MSE offers a similar feature.

There are some things about MSE that I don't like: It is not as light on resources as I would like, the full scan takes too long, you need to have windows updates set to automatically install.

[ALookingInView]

Went ahead and installed MSE on my main desktop, where it will stay as long as Microsoft keeps it competitive.
There is something very appealing to me about having first party security as key components of a config.
The no nonsense, no ads, no nags, no registration, no cost pros of MSE certainly don't hurt anything either.

I once considered Panda Cloud Antivirus (Free) until I realized that I hadn't seen a single decent performance in any of the many YouTube video reviews I'd seen.
The opinions provided by the rM community were also a factor.

Other Panda products have recently tested very well at AV-C, but for some reason Cloud Antivirus doesn't appear to share the same excellent detection rate.
A false positive problem continues to haunt all the different offerings from Panda, PCA(V?) included.
Cloud Antivirus in particular also has a couple issues that really reveal its age or lack thereof.
I'm certain it'll be a contender one of these days (so long as Panda stays committed to it), but at this point I'm not sure I'd trust it to keep Conficker.A at bay.

[codylucas16]

Evidentally here I'm gonna have to vote Panda Cloud. V1.1 has really impressed me. Lately between alot of my family members there have been an outbreak of koobfaces through facebok. I have family members running MSE, Avast, and Panda cloud. MSE is still not detecting these koobfaces and some have been there for a month, i just finished removing the koobface from a friends machine that was running MSE and even updating MSE and scanning detected zilch after three weeks of being infected. Avast had detected the threats within 2 days of the release via the network shield and Panda had detected them before any users i know using it got the chance to get infected.

Because of this Panda gets my vote.

[ALookingInView]

I actually can't even recall the last time I was infected with anything more than a false positive, family's PCs as well.
I'd be tempted to go with Panda too if I experienced the above though.

[Dieselman]

Off topic comment removed. This isn't about Comodo.

[Knightmare]

MSE all the way.

+1