Antivirus Software Roundup -- Protect Your PC From Guys Like This!
AVG Internet Security 8.0
An old favorite gets a new look
Now in version 8.0, AVG’s latest release appears to have taken a page or three from Vista. A redesigned interface sports high-resolution icons and a more colorful palette, and even the system tray icon feels borrowed from Microsoft’s newest OS; turn off one of the security modules and the icon turns red, alerting you of impending doom, even if you’ve only disabled the spam filter. That’s just wacky. Thankfully, you can turn off the ominous notification.
No other AV application we tested consumed more RAM, and our performance benchmarks took the biggest hit with AVG installed. During a system scan (which, while not the slowest, dragged along at the tail end of all the suites), CPU utilization averaged 25 percent with sporadic spikes reaching as high as 84 percent. We didn’t know if AVG was scanning or having a seizure.
AVG provides one of the more feature-rich packages of the bunch. In addition to the new scanning engine, you’ll find spam and spyware protection, a firewall, safeguards against drive-by downloads, immunity against IM-bound attacks (IQC and MSN only), a customizable scheduler, and a rootkit scanner. Tying it all together is a back end brimming with options to satiate even the most demanding security connoisseur.
We especially like the concept behind AVG’s web protection; we just wish it worked better. The Active Surf-Shield component scans visited web pages for malicious code and the Search Shield checks Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results for active threats, but enabling them slows down web surfing. And at the time of this writing, Search Shield was not working with Firefox 3.0.
AVG’s detection rate dips below that of the best-performing AV apps during Virus Bulletin’s extensive testing but still earned a VB100 award, meaning it caught all of VB’s in-the-wild viruses with no false positives. ANG also excelled in our own tests. Just make sure you have a modern system to run it on.
Verdict: 7
www.grisoft.com
$55 (2 yrs)
Avast! 4 Home Edition
You won’t find many diamonds in this rough
It’s almost as if Czech-based developer ALWIL intentionally designed Avast! to be annoying, starting with the exclamation point in the program’s title. We can forgive the name, but we’re not so quick to offer amnesty for the program’s other failings.
Despite being offered as a free download for home use, you’re required to register the product, after which you’ll be sent a product key. Without it, the program will stop working after 60 days. Worse yet, you have to re-register every year just as you do with a paid program, which doesn’t instill confidence that ALWIL won’t one day decide to stop offering Avast! gratis.
What starts off as a ridiculously fast install time turns into a 20-minute endeavor if you choose to perform a boot-time scan during the required system restart. Scanning our test system from within Windows was even slower, taking 24 minutes, making Avast! by far the pokiest of the pack. The slow-footed scanner was also the second-largest system hog.
We’re not sold on the gimmicky main menu, which deliberately resembles a media player complete with a play, pause, and stop dial for controlling system scans. We’re grateful the On-Access Scanner menu takes a more mainstream approach, and it’s here where you’ll spend time customizing the several shields. In addition to the usual suspects—web shield, Outlook/Exchange module, Internet mail controls, system and network shields—you’ll find support for nearly every IM and P2P client you can think of.
It’s a shame so much about Avast! annoys us because the scanning engine, despite bogging down our system, had us strutting across the web with reckless abandon. Avast! cut off all forms of malware at the knees, preventing us from downloading various forms of pestilence and blockading their websites of origin. But ultimately you’re just trading one inconvenience for another.
Verdict: 5
www.avast.com
Free
AviraAntivir
A superbly high detection rate makes up for paltry options
At first glance, you might be inclined to dismiss Avira’s AntiVir as nothing more than a run-of-the-mill virus scanner with a feature set that’s as meager as its price. The sparse interface certainly won’t wow any power users, but it would be a mistake to cast AntiVir aside based solely on appearance. A tiny checkbox in the upper-left corner of the configuration screen unlocks the program’s Expert mode, and with it a heap of options previously unavailable. This still doesn’t put the program on par with the more robust packages in our roundup, nor is the menu system laid out as intelligently as some of the other programs’. Nevertheless, you’re given enough control not to feel cheated, even for software you didn’t have to pay for.
You can choose between three levels of heuristic scanning (low, medium, or high) or turn it off completely. Likewise, enabling the Macrovirus heuristics option will ensure that all macros are deleted in the event an infection necessitates a repair. AntiVir will also rummage for rootkits and examine emails for suspect files, and it even proved surprisingly successful at killing off keyloggers, a feature Avira doesn’t list for any of its security products. What it won’t do is combat most forms of spyware or prevent hackers from exploiting your browser.
AntiVir’s biggest strength lies in its detection rate. It’s the only scanner in our roundup to triumph with a near clean sweep during Virus Bulletin’s latest testing, and it did so without reporting any false positives. That’s impressive. AntiVir performed equally well in our Lab, as long as we didn’t attempt to install spyware or hijack the browser.
If you can live with the popup ad AntiVir forces you to view each time a scheduled update is performed, you’ll be rewarded with a potent, no-cost AV scanner. Move over AVG, we have a new favorite freebie.
Verdict: 8
www.free-av.com
Free