Ron Schenone

Avast Free Antivirus 5 – First Look – Preliminary Review

Posted by on Jan 25, 2010 | 5 Comments

About a week ago I downloaded and installed the free version of Avast Antivirus version #5 onto my personal laptop computer. As many of you know, I have been using the free version of AVG for about 5 years, and for the most part, have been very satisfied with AVG. I have never had an infection so in theory, AVG has worked well.

But I read some of your comments and many of you have suggested using Avast instead. So here is what I am going to do. I am going to try Avast for 30 days and than do a full review of the software. I found this description of Avast and what it does:

From ALWIL Software :

Avast Free Antivirus is based on multiple protective layers that work together to provide security. The product is designed for the average consumer who wants easy-to-use protection for basic email and web surfing. It is limited to home and non-commercial users.

New features match top detection with increased efficiency. Computer memory requirements for the new antivirus and antispyware engine have been cut in half. Scanning is 40 percent faster, saving both time and computer resources. Complete rootkit protection includes real-time detection to ward off initial installation, on-demand scanning and boot-time scans. The user friendly 5.0 has a new interface with easy-to-adjust settings, a context-sensitive help menu and graphs showing ongoing protection activities. Users can set the time and conditions for complete scans, with avast even waking up their computer from hibernation for midnight scans before putting it back to bed. Multiple shields prevent the spread of malware via email by checking incoming and outgoing emails for suspect content, identify malware by its anticipated behavior or by looking out for unusual activity and attempts at system modifications.

I must say the user interface is simple to navigate and easy to setup. For the average user this should be very simple. I did a quick scan and it was fairly fast. No threats were found which I have to give credit to AVG for protecting my system.

As I stated I will be doing a follow-up review in 30 days from today.

Comments welcome.

Source – Download your free copy of Avast from here

  • Ryan Farmer

    I generally don’t like antivirus, the failure rates are obviously the first thing to look at.

    Some antivirus fails 40% of the time, once you get up to Norton and McAfee, it generally fails around 10% of the time.

    I like to say “If there was a brand of condom with those failure rates, they wouldn’t be on the market long”.

    The next thing to look at is what kind of performance impact it will have on your PC. Norton is consistently the biggest drag on system performance.

    Avast is one of the faster ones and generally manages a 98-99% detection rate, so I usually recommend that.

  • Kim

    I used to use AVG (paid up version) and was ‘converted’ to CA Antivirus. This was always such a hassle to renew so went to Avast. As an anti-virus is is good, but there is an issue with Avast and MS Word/MS Outlook. If I choose Word as my email editor it bombs my Outlook. I’m on XP/Office 2003. Anyone got a fix for this?
    Thanks.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    Kim,
    Thanks for the info. I thought it was just my system that was doing this. It got so bad on my system I had to uninstall Avast last night and go back to AVG.

    I’ll do an article about this issue to see if we get any help. I liked using Avast and was disturbed having to uninstall it.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone
  • http://thevirusfighter.blogspot.com/ Ron – The Virusfighter

    I was going to give a thumbs up to Avast until I read about the “XP/Office 2003″ problem.

    I did not have that issue back when I used Avast – not sure if I had Office 2003 on the computer I installed Avast on.
    I worked on another person’s computer – they had a virus –
    used AOL antivirus / antimalware products – and got infected with some malware – they downloaded
    Noton online – Norton did not remove the virus – and due to the virus fighting Norton, some of their programs would not run correctly – Could not access their QuickBooks in Multiuser mode and could not download anything from the Internet.
    I un-installed Norton and was able to download from the Internet. I then proceeded to download Avast – as I used it at that time – that was back in the year 2006 or 2007 -
    Avast proceeded to clean the computer and finished process on next reboot – ran online scanners and all clean and worked well. So I had good reason to like it.

    I also use Avira Free on one of my computers – it seems to do a good job. Has the occasional pop up advertisement trying to get you to purchase the paid version – but easy to OK out of that.
    I also use AVG – like it as well.
    Hope Avast fixes the problem with Office 2003, other than that problem I believe that it is a good product.