Prior to you even open the program, you’ll notice a gadget sitting on your Windows desktop. It’s a circle with a half moon of color that indicates your system’s health (say, green when everything’s okay). There are two virtual mouse buttons in the lower half of that circle, which you are able to customize as shortcuts for whatever features interest you, like parental controls or the residence network monitor. We love that you are able to drag and drop files onto it to scan them for viruses.

Out of the box, Kaspersky comes ready to throw down with any malware feeling foggy sufficient to jump. Nearly as if trying to prove a point, Kaspersky wouldn’t even enable us to go to our synthetic spyware website until we configured the web module to chilax and let us poke our head into suspicious web portals. Not that it mattered, for the reason that Kaspersky was unfazed by every of spyware attempts to hijack our browser and simulate other malicious behavior. We once more had to disable the web module so that you can download our dirty archive brimming with real malware, and once much more Kaspersky shrugged off our shenanigans by keeping the lid tightly closed no matter how hard we tried to open it.

Kasperky’s Safe Run feature also extends to the desktop. If you’re unsure about that screensaver you just downloaded, the Safe Run option-found in the right-click context menu-runs the program in a virtual environment. This sandbox mode isolates the potentially unsavory app from making changes to the OS, and adds a layer of privacy-IMs, emails, and other communications are deleted once you exit the app.