WatchDog Antivirus Review: Quick Expert Summary

My PC Watchdog’s website promises more than antivirus protection. This service offers unlimited online backup, system tune up, patch management, and dedicated engineers to protect your computer 24/7. Unfortunately, I was unable to verify many of the features and the core antivirus did not seem to work.

Epid Phishing ProtectionProducts with the best phishing protection usually use a two-pronged approach. They block fraudulent websites that have been blacklisted and reported. They also do real-time analysis in order to uncover phishing websites that are too new to be included on the blacklist. This second layer of phishing detection is missing from My PC Watchdog.

I used data scraped from several phishing-oriented websites to test for antiphishing. I looked for URLs that had been reported as fraudulent, but have not been analyzed or blacklisted. Each browser is launched in five browsers: one protected by the product being tested, one by Norton and one each by the built-in protections in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

My Computer Watchdog Antiphishing Chart

Although my PC Watch dog was able to detect a few fraudulent transactions, its overall score was one of the lowest that I have ever seen. It had a detection rate that was full 81 percent lower than Norton’s and 71% lower than Chrome’s built in protection. Firefox and IE performed better than My PC Watchdog.

After the antiphishing and malicious URL blocking tests, the online dashboard’s list for Recent Domain Blocks grew to more than 500 entries. Nearly all were Enterprise Malware. There were a few other types of malware, such as Enterprise Malware Phishing or Drive-by Downloads/Exploits.

Additional Features
The online dashboard will show statistics about OS, program, security, and threats. The updates are done automatically and without your involvement. You won’t find a log or a list of the updates; you will have to rely on the program for these stats. Performance tuning is the same. It is up to you to believe that it actually did help.

You can find useful information on the dashboard. While you may know the amount of RAM and processor type you have, do you also have the serial number for your system? What about your IP address? Although there are many ways to obtain this information, it is convenient to have it all in one place.

The simple pie chart showing free disk space was not what I was looking for. It’s possible to get this chart using Windows. My PC Watchdog does something that I haven’t seen in any other software. It will search your system to find the product keys for Windows, and other popular programs. This can come in handy when you have to reinstall.