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Does anybody here have any experience with Avast Anti-Virus? I've been asked for my opinion, but haven't used it.
Are there other free-ware anti-virus software packages worth anything?
If money isn't an issue, what would be everyone's preferred anti-virus package?
I'm a fan. Some of my customers have bought it they were so impressed with it NOT slowing down the machine to a crawl...
Slow machine - P3 600mhz 256mb ram (8mb shared video) running avast did not show any difference in load times.... only Nod32 could have done that.
Avast! would be my choice in free AV software, but it does have a bit more system load than AVG. AVG free just isn't that good, though there are many worse AV programs out there.
I currently run NOD32 on 5 of my computers. It is small, fast, and updates multiple times daily. The interface is a little flaky, but not too hard to figure out. Norton is still excellent. NAV 2006 and 2007 offer daily automatic updates, but older versions only update weekly, though manual updates are posted daily. NAV 2007 is much less of a drain on performance than all earlier verions, but still a pretty heavy hit.
If you want to explore AV software in more depth, you might want to check out Virus Bulletin at: http://www.virusbtn.com/index
I wasn't a fan of the free anti-virus programs until someone showed me Avast. I load it on most of the computers I work on because many people do not want to pony up the cash for a retail product and McAfee and Norton's comsumer lines have not impressed me in a long time.
I prefer AVG. The Avast is ok but there are two separate update tabs-one for definitions and one for the program. With AVG it's one click for both, and the entire time spent checking for an update from the time you click to the time its done and you close it is literally 3 seconds for AVG. This makes it easy to tell and show my customers how to do it manually, eliminating the problem where an antivirus my not be getting updates on its own. (I don't install it for them, but I tell them how, due to the free license terms)
Also, you can't schedule Avast scans, they have a default time, and once they start I can't figure out how to stop or pause them. A real hassle when you need to work on your computer and its crawling due to the scan.
Avg has two options. Never scan or scan every day at 8am. Scanning every day at 8am slows your computer every morning. So I always choose don't automatically scan. I scan manually, once a week I click the AVG and click Scan my Computer. The advantage to this is it scans when I want, and I know it has scanned.
I take your point about the scheduled scan - but you can schedule a scan with Home version if you follow these instructions
As for updating, the program and the virus files autoupdate, so what is the problem? You can also combine the two icons by right clicking on the "i" icon and selecting combine... One thing AVG won't do is hold a database of files which allows you to repair files after infection.