Wednesday, October 31, 2007

AVG Free Edition antivirus review

Anti-Virus software is important for protection of your computer. This software keeps your computer alive while you surf the internet. There are many anti-virus software vendors in the market, some of them will provide you with free versions of their products. Free antivirus software may be the only option for people with the limited budget. Today we will consider features of one of the free antivirus solutions, which is named AVG Free Edition v7.5. AVG Free Edition is the very popular antivirus protection tool. It is available at no cost to home users for the life of the product.
AVG Free Edition is an anti-virus scanner that provides on demand scanner, resident file and email protection, and Virus Vault for safe treatment of infected files and automatic updates. The free version is limited in features, but it uses the same scanning engine as the commercial version and provides all basic scanning functionality as well as real-time protection. This anti-virus has been certified be effective at detecting 100% of in-the-wild viruses.
The first time you run AVG Free Edition, it checks for updates and creates a rescue diskette for recovery if a virus infection makes your computer non-bootable. Rescue diskette enables you to remove viruses or restore your operating system areas from the MS DOS environment.
The program has two main windows - Test Center and Control Center. AVG Control Center is the main console, which launches automatically upon Windows startup, and you can see its icon in the system tray. It lists all installed components, gives information on their status, and allows you to fully configure them. A panel for each module includes its description and current status, but you need to click to see the full text. You can check and update the virus database; configure on-access, context-menu and e-mail scans; and view quarantined viruses in the Virus Vault.



Test Center allows you to perform tests, update your AVG and edit some basic configurations. You can manually scan all your hard drives or scan only selected files. Virus scans can be automatically scheduled when you choose.

avg-free-test-center-image

AVG Free Edition is integrated into system and can be accessible through the shortcut menu. You can select objects for fast check then to start their scanning. AVG supports many of the most popular email programs and scans all your incoming and outgoing emails. The big advantage of the program is low system resource requirements and high speed of operations, scanning of files and folders occurs very fast. Thus, process of revealing of viruses practically does not influence productivity of the operating system in any way.
AVG Free Edition does not offer protection from adware or spyware (though it is available in the paid version of the product). As with other free antivirus scanners, support options are limited to online help forums and knowledgebases.
I use AVG about six months and I have had no more virus problems, so take account of this review and make sure you always use an updated anti-virus software.
You can download AVG Free Edition 7.5 here. (29 MB)