360 Total Security Review And Free Download

I have been a faithful user of Kaspersky Lab products for many years and have been running one of the Kaspersky security products on all of my PCs. Every year, I purchase Kaspersky Internet Security license available for 3 PCs and install the latest available version to make sure that my PCs are protected by the best security software out there for Windows.
My Kaspersky license is about to expire, and hence, I have been trying out a couple of security products other than Kaspersky on my PC where I test third-party applications. This morning, I was going through AV-Test results and was surprised to know that 360 Total Security product has scored equally or better than many other popular antivirus or internet security products from very well-known developers. For those who haven’t heard about AV-Test, it’s an independent IT-security institute and tests security products on regular basis.
As you can see, 360 Total Security has scored equally or better than paid security products. Yes, 360 Total Security is free! So, I decided to install 360 Total Security and use it for some time. To start with, 360 Total Security offers you multi-engine protection. That is, it includes five engines, including 360 Cloud, Avira, and Bitdefender to offer the best security and detection rate.

Please note that when you install 360 Total Security, it installs only three engines: 360 Cloud, system repair engine, and QVMII AI engine. In short, it doesn’t install Bitdefender and Avira engines with default, and you need to manually install them later by switching to Virus Scan tab, hovering on Bitdefender and Avira icons, and finally, clicking on the switch.
It also includes a system cleaning utility to help you delete junk files and free up some disk space. In addition to that, the boot time monitoring tool displays boot up time and offers options to speed up the boot by removing unwanted programs from the startup.
The sandbox feature, as the name suggest, lets you run and test suspicious applications without affecting your system’s security. Even though, it doesn’t offer too many settings and options to tweak default settings, as long as it’s offering a good protection, I think that’s fine.

However, it turns out that 360 Total Security includes a Download Manager to download virus pattern update using P2P sharing. While testing it, I observed that the tool continuously uploads pattern updates using this P2P sharing and you might want to disable this if you are on a metered network by clicking on the menu button located upper right (next to minimize button) of the window and then checking the option labelled Do not upload after P2P upgrade.
Other thing what I have observed is that 360 Total Security doesn’t scan compressed files during full scan (scans compressed files during custom scan only) with default settings. You might want to configure it to scan compressed files during full disk scan for better security.

Another worth mentioning thing about 360 Total Security is its setup file size. It’s just 25 MB (current version of the program) and is very small when compared to its competitors.
Overall, 360 Total Security looks like a good security product if the test result by AV-Test is anything to go by and the fact that it’s a free product. The user interface, as you can see, is very beautiful and easy to navigate. The only downside, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t include its own firewall system to support its other features but that should not stop you from giving it a tray, as the native Windows Firewall is pretty good.
For those who’re curious, Qihoo 360 had over 475 active internet users by the end of December 2013 and is a very popular security product developer in China.
Download 360 Total Security