AVG but without the problems (Avast 4 Home Edition)

Member Name: grahamt

Product:	Avast 4 Home Edition
Date:	07/12/05 (9087 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free and without any obvious problems

Disadvantages: None that I've found so far

If you have read my review of my experiences of AVG Antivirus, especially Version 7, you will know that all did not go smoothly. I particularly had problems with old machines which didn't have a lot of memory. This was a surprise because I never had a moments trouble with the previous release and was happy to recommend it. As, from AVG7, you couldn't get any support without paying, I decided to deinstall it.

Now, running without any antivirus protection is possibly the silliest thing to do, I clearly needed an alternative if I was to continue to use these machines. Actually, by this time it was this machine rather than these machines. My wife's old Medion Lifetec had, by now gone to the great laptop graveyard and been replaced with a Packard Bell Easynote, which came with Norton already installed as part of the package.

So, it was only my old Toshiba Tecra 8000 with a Pentium II 333MHz processor and 256 Meg of memory, running MS WindowsMe (can't run anything higher and the Toshiba architecture is so idiosyncratic that Linux has problems – I have tried) that still needed protection. What should I use? I was reluctant to pay for an antivirus product as anything was likely to be more expensive that the value of the machine itself!

After searching the Internet I came across Avast! (http://www.avast.com/), from a Czech company called Alwil Software. They have various versions of their antivirus solution but the one in which I was interested was their Home Edition, which they describe as being free for use by home users and non-commercial organisations.

They also do a Professional Edition for users who do not meet the “free” criteria and for which they do charge, starting at $39.95 for a single licence for one year of updates and support. There are other versions including a server version, a version for Linux users and one for PDAs running Palm OS or Windows CE.

So, I downloaded the Home Edition (HE). I made sure that it was the English version as they also localise versions in a whole range of languages as well. The download weighs in at around 9.5 MBs.

The install was very straightforward. You register on the website and in return you get an activation key for the product.

Avast Antivirus is very feature-rich and covers just about every requirement you could want from this sort of solution. The basic kernel is capable of looking into a whole range of compressed file formats, from the universal ZIP through MS CAB files, email attachment MIME files, Outlook Express DBX files, MS Exchange PST email archives and many, many more.

Two process start up on your machine, one is the Resident Protection, the other is the Virus Recovery Database Generator (VRDG). The VRDG is there so that, if all else fails and a virus still gets onto your machine, it will fire up and do it's best to repair the damage.

The Resident Protection covers your computer's file systems and the email and news that you download. You can set the level of “sensitivity” though this will likely affect performance. For email it analyses all the standard email protocols and in addition there is a plugin specifically for MS Outlook. However, as I use Mozilla Thunderbird, this is of no use to me so I have to make do with the standard protection.

There are additional modules included that provide protection for Chat programs and for Peer-to-Peer file sharing programs. I don't use either of these so cannot comment on their effectiveness. A new addition to Release 4.5 version is a Network module that examines network traffic to ensure that nothing gets through that way, not that I'm suggesting that your Granny might be releasing viruses over your home network of course!

Most importantly it analyses all of the traffic hitting your web browser and in this it is compatible with all of the major browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, which I use. There are many other features so I recommend that you visit the website for a full run-down. But, what's it like in action?

Well, I have been using it for several months now and have never had a moments problem, which already puts it one up on AVG. The virus signatures are regularly updated and whenever a new version of the software is available it lets me know so that I can upgrade. The current version is 4.6, the version I am using. I have not had any virus infections but I haven't tried deliberately throwing them at it to see how it will deal with them.

You can launch the main file scanning program from the menu attached to the Avast icon in your System Tray. This will give you access to the selective scanning features of Avast. By default it launches the “Simple User Interface”, which describes the features available (you can chose to stop this once you are familiar with its operation), together with the actual scanning program. This is “skinned” to look like an MP3 player. The central “window” displays status information and around it are various “buttons” that give access to the functions.

You can set the level of scan from Quick right up to Thorough. You can also select the files and directories to be scanned. I tried a Thorough scan of the entire C Drive, including all Archive files, to see how long it would take. On my machine it took 2 hours and examined 100,000 files. I don't reckon that's bad.

So, what's my verdict. I reckon Avast is pretty good. It does the job for me and does it better than AVG which, up until now has been the standard by which to judge. Based on my experiences I think the new kid on the block could be the new standard.

Summary: A free, comprehensive antivirus solution that works

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