Firewall:  

The firewall included with ESET Smart Security is solid and does its job well. The base configuration will learn what you use and configure the firewall to deal with it correctly in most situations. There is an option to ask you every time a program tries to access the internet, but most people will not have to use this. We needed it for Google Desktop and Pidgin to work correctly.

If you are in need of advanced firewall rules, it can be a chore to find the correct place to enter them. Once you do find the area within the advanced setup tree, creating the rules is pretty straightforward, but if you have never done it before and are new to custom rules, you may want to read up on how-to before you take a stab at it.

Antivirus:  

The virus scanner included with ESET Smart Security is average in its ability to detect viruses. It caught nearly everything we threw at it, but missed one of our old viruses we use for testing. Considering this virus has not been used since the late 90's, we are not too worried about that. Everything else we threw at it was caught or checked.

Scan times were very fast at just over 20 minutes for our test machine. That is extremely fast compared with several other suites whose scans took an excess of 2 hours.

Antispyware:  

ESET Smart Security is fairly good at detecting some spyware in the form of spam and trojans. The spam filter is decent and will integrate fully with Outlook. It will also look at all email coming to your system over POP3. POP3 is one of the standard protocols that is used to get email from your ISP or email provider. The spam filter doesn't look at IMAP connections for email though. IMAP is another way to get email from your ISP or email provider. It is quite common, and ESET seems to have left this out when building their spam filter.

The trojan scanner is integrated with the virus scanner. It caught all of our attempts to install or download trojan horses on our test system, but missed 3 out of 5 trojans that we already had running.

ESET Smart Security missed all of the tracking cookies we had present on our system as well as two malicious tool bars we had installed in Internet Explorer.

Other Security/Features:  

ESET Smart Security doesn't really include much besides a firewall and antivirus scanner. The spyware features are light and are integrated with the virus scanner more than anything. The anti spam features are there, but are not in the high-end spectrum.

Ease of Use:  

ESET is easy to use. The menus make sense though the default configuration is less than spectacular, so those menus will become familiar to you pretty quickly.

Ease of Installation/Setup:  

The installation of ESET Smart Security was quite easy. A few mouse clicks and a quick update procedure was all it took to get the suite working. Configuration was all done upon startup, though specific areas may require more than the default configuration to get working correctly.

Help/Support:  

ESET offers 3 ways to get support. The help file included with ESET Smart Security is good, but doesn't have enough information when it comes to advanced configurations. ESET also offers an online knowledge base and email support.

ESET is an average security suite. It offers the major components of a security suite, but leaves out a lot of the extras that are included with the bigger players. Things like parental controls and computer settings protection are not included. The antispyware features are severely lacking as well. If all you need are antivirus, a firewall and spam protection, this program is a good fit.