PCRAVC.RVW 950915 Comparison Review Company and product: Company: Rising Computer Science and Technology Company Address: Level 3, North Block, Yi Bin Fan Dian, Hai Dian District, Beijing 100080, P. R. China Phone: 256-7073 Fax: 256-4934 Contact: Alex Lau Email: alau@sirius.com Product: Rising Anti-Virus Card (RAVC) Summary: hardware based activity monitor for Intel/BIOS/ISA computers Cost: unknown Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good) "Friendliness" Installation 2 Ease of use 2 Help systems 1 Compatibility 3 Company Stability 2 Support 1 Documentation 1 Hardware required 4 Performance 2 Availability 1 Local Support 1 General Description: Small form factor ISA card with ROM extensions for activity monitoring and write protection. Comparison of features and specifications User Friendliness Installation The package, as I received it, had the card, a 1.44M writable but protected disk and no instructions. Installation should apparently be a simple matter of installing the card. None of the four programs on the disk appear to be necessary either to installation or to operation. There are four dip switches on the card. The MEMTEST program seems to have provision for determining what the positions of the switches should be, but in my installation it did not give any clear statement, and the positioning which seemed to be indicated was not correct. On first installation, the card produced a ROM checksum error and denied access to the hard disk. After a number of installation attempts, the card allowed the system to boot normally. Ease of use When a suspect activity is detected, the user is presented with a box onscreen In some cases this is a clear direction, such as to reboot the computer from a clean disk; an informational message, such as notice that a suspect program has been removed from memory; or a rather terse menu of choices to reboot, "Yes" (allow the suspect operation) or abort (the program currently running). Help systems None provided. Compatibility The program did not produce overt conflicts with programs. Utilities performing disk writes to system areas and modification of programs will generate alerts and may be terminated. Testing with a limited set of viral programs did not uncover any obvious weaknesses in the package. The RAVC was not tested with Windows, but does not appear to have provisions for it. (With other similar packages the alert screen does not appear but the alert beep can be heard.) Company Stability Unknown, but said to be a major vendor in China. Company Support None provided. Documentation None provided. This makes determination of other factors difficult. System Requirements Stated to be DOS 2.0 or higher. The card will work with any 8 or 16-bit ISA or EISA slot. Performance The activity monitor appears to check for modification of .COM and .EXE files, but not .BAT or .SYS. Boot sector infectors are prevented from infecting the hard disk. In the case of a boot sector infector, the user is requested to boot from a clean system disk, but this does not appear to be necessary. Attempts to write or copy to .COM files produced irregular alerts, but I was never able to get a virus to successfully infect. System infectors which do not directly write to executable files were also unsuccessful. Companion viral programs were not tested but the creation of new executable files usually prompted an alert. Copying or updating of software files is subject to numerous alerts and the RAVC would likely be unsuitable for development environments. It should probably be removed during software upgrades. Programs provided for the setting and clearing of passwords, and a network program, have no discernable effect on operation. Local Support None provided. Support Requirements If there are no problems with installation, this could be used unsupported in an environment where programs are not changed. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995 PCRAVC.RVW 950915 ====================== roberts@decus.ca rslade@vanisl.decus.ca aa046@freenet.victoria.bc.ca If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94311-0/3-540-94311-0