I decided to make this post because they've apparently spent some cash on getting people to write biased reviews that will give potential users an absolutely wrong idea of what it is. In short: TotalAV is vaporware -- using all the common customer-binding tactics you'd expect from it.
After only 5 minutes of using their software it's clear that the review sites giving high marks are not honest reviews. Their "free" version (marked as trial) is clearly nothing but a big, system-invasive adware application to sell their services.
Starting off: registration required to get anything out of their trial. Registration of an account for a free product is odd, to begin with, since people wanting to trial software in general would not have a need to surrender personal information to software vendors. But considering what I found out after signing up, I'm not surprised.
Here we go then:
- First off, it detected a competitive product/vendor (IObit) as "malware" while it is not (I happened to have a version of some of IObit's software installed to check out). That's really low, people. Seriously. Definite Security Faux Pas to mark competitors as malware.
- Secondly, when trying to "resolve the threat" it only opens a web page to "upgrade to ultimate antivirus" through purchase without actually resolving anything (what kind of a trial is that?). So, register your personal details first before you get to see our scanner and purchase first before you can actually trial its functionality...
- Thirdly, "Web security", marked as a critical item constitutes their VPN service. Another item that I couldn't "trial" because it requires immediate (separate) purchase.
While VPN that may protect a user from some things, it is not "safe browsing" and it certainly does not "stop hackers and snoopers from watching your online activities" (quote from their pop-up message when trying to enable it). It also means the user is entrusting them performing traffic routing for all internet traffic without any clear description or policies stated about the service. e.g. request logging, data retention, proxying/MitM SSL, etc. - Next, they have a "System boost" feature which is supposed to show items slowing down your PC. It lists "history entries and browser cookies" as a potential slow-down item. What a load of hogwash! Recommending people toss out their history as a "good practice" to "speed up their system"? Come on.
They clearly have no clue how browsers work. And, of course, when you try to use it, it does nothing but telling you "Oops you're using the free version and you can't actually do anything until you give us your cash". - Their "disk cleaner" includes a duplicate files scanner. It would break a good number of my installed applications by removing "duplicate files" from application folders.
The interface for it is also clumsy with badly-proportioned selection lists and you MUST select every duplicate manually, yourself -- and it also finds fake duplicates (same folder, same file) so it doesn't even work right. - Their "shredder" isn't actually a shredder (it doesn't make data unrecoverable which is essential for private data you'd use a shredder for), it will simply perform the same task as Windows' built-in "disk cleanup". Oh and yes, also not functional in the "trial" and popping up a "pay us your money now" box when attempted to use.
- Real-time protection can't be enabled (another "no-trial" option) and as such system performance impact (which is essential) can't be evaluated without a purchase.
Considering their setup, I'm not surprised their retention is high because only people dumb enough to believe all this and think it will actually help them, would ever buy this product/service, and not think twice about it (likely ex-McAfee or ex-Symantec users).
Of course for me, it doesn't matter that they've paid publishers good money to give shining reviews when the product is actually vaporware.
Digging a little deeper, their software is an amalgamation of libraries from different vendors.
Their antivirus is the Avira engine. It's not even their own. otherwise it's a .net application that doesn't do anything special and is just a front-end for some file operations and an OpenVPN client.
thank you for your "review" of TotalAV and their sibling "ScamGuard"
