With its ease of use, fast scanning, and excellent detection rates, my first choice is Avira Antivir Personal Edition. Although it lacks an email scanning feature, it compensates by the speed in which the real-time protection leaps to your defence when any threats, including infected email attachments, are detected. As of version 9, Avira protects against Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Rootkits, Dialers, Spyware and Adware. I have no information, as yet, regarding the effectiveness of the anti-spyware and anti-adware components.
From version 9, Avira also adds the facility to review suspect items at the end of a scan, rather than dealing with each item when detected. This leaves the user free to run a scan unattended at any time and simply deal with the results when appropriate.
I do have criticisms. The large advert for the paid version which accompanies the updates, but it only takes a click to make it go away. In recent months many people have encountered problems with updates although this issue seems to have been resolved. You also need to periodically reregister.
If you need an antivirus with extra features, Avast! Free AntiVirus may be the answer. Avast has full real-time capabilities, including web, e-mail, IM, P2P and network shields, boot-time scanning, and a behavioural blocker. Avast is light on resources. Detection rates are good but not quite up to the standard of Avira.
Many of the protection mechanisms used by Avast rely on interactive Windows services. Support in Windows 7 / Vista 64 for interactive services is intended for use by legacy applications. This places restrictions on the information that can be sent to the user.
Both Avira and Avast are hybrid 64 bit applications. Only the low level kernel mode drivers that interface with operating system are written in 64 bit code.
You can have more than one AV product installed, but only one should be enabled for real-time scanning. The same applies to email scanning.
If you are interested in alternatives to Avira and Avast, such as AVG Free,a-squared Free, or Microsoft Security Essentials, then refer to our review:
No comments:
Post a Comment