CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 04/09/2007
- Updated on: 09/12/2008
eEye Digital Security, famous for its discovery of the Code Red worm back in 2001, has done a very responsible thing by porting one of its enterprise tools, Blink, down to the desktop level. And Blink Personal edition is available for free. It will be seen as impressive for advanced users, and a little overwhelming for average users. The Internet security suite provides the basics--antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing, and personal firewall--with more controls for intrusion protection, buffer overflows, system registry protection, and vulnerability assessment. But average users won't want --or ever use--all the configuration options included here. Free or not, casual users are better off with a more user-friendly suite from
ZoneAlarm or
Setup
For the moment, Blink Personal is free for a limited time for personal use, although eEye may continue this offer indefinitely. Blink Professional, designed more for the small business, costs $59 for a single-seat license, with pricing up to one hundred seats available. Blink Personal and Professional both work on Windows 2000 through Windows XP. Windows Vista is not currently supported.
Downloading the suite is a chore. First, you must submit information to receive the actual download link via e-mail. Once downloaded and installed, you must once again submit personal information to register the product. The free Blink Personal will only run on one machine. Addition machines require additional sign-ups. This is similar to the program used by
Should you want to remove Blink Personal, there's no uninstall icon provided. You'll need to use the Windows Control Center Add or Remove Programs. Unlike other programs, Blink asks if you want to remove any configuration information and also the license to use the product. Too many vendors remove the application but leave the license info behind, sometimes fouling installations of competing software. After our program uninstall and a reboot, we found no traces of Blink Personal remaining on our system, including the license information within the system registry that we requested be removed. Of all the suites we reviewed, only ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 7 completely uninstalled itself.
Interface
To be user friendly, Blink Personal needs to provide a better interface. In porting the tool down from its enterprise version, eEye gives desktop users an inelegant interface similar to any of Microsoft's Sysinternal tools offerings. While Blink Personal follows the Microsoft Windows XP design look and feel--with an expandable navigation panel along the left, and a main window to the right--the Windows-blue coloring and Microsoft-esque icons can be confusing to the casual user. For example, at first glance, Blink Personal appears indistinguishable from the Windows Control Center.
While other security suites offer a system status report up front, alerting users to run updates or scans where necessary, there is none of that here. The closest thing to an overall status report is one produced by the vulnerability assessment tool (see below).
Then there's the naming conventions which might be confusing to some. For example, antiphishing protection is found under Identity Theft Protection. System Firewall is a separate listing from Application Firewall. Some features, like antivirus and antispyware, are simply renamed as Anti-Malware. While these names are technically correct, the average user may struggle to find where they need to go to schedule or run the antivirus protection or an antispyware scan.
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