AVG Antivirus Review

This program is available directly from the vendor.

Vendor's antivirus software homepage:
http://www.grisoft.com

Pros - AVG Antivirus:

• Better than to be expected from a free antivirus program
• DOS scanner included
• But only an option for those with absolutely no money

• Comes only with a basic (automated) interface without the possibility to adjust any settings
• Doesn't check for double infected files
• Some users have had freezes and other major stability issues on Windows 2000 and XP
• Slows down your computer considerably
• Inserts ads in your email messages.
• You need to use DOS commands for some advanced operations.
• Log file displays limited info
• You can't see anything in systray, so you don't know if it's running or not

• Terrible virus detection rate
• Doesn't update their virus definition files very often (monthly intervals, should be twice a week)
• Deletes infected files without warning. This is especially bad if the file didn't contain a virus after all (a false positive).
• Very low on scripts, backdoors and trojans.

• MS Outlook
• MS Outlook Express 5.x and higher
• Qualcomm Eudora
• MS Exchange

AVG Antivirus is a poor performer in detecting and removing viruses, in fact it stands out as one of the worst of the more popular programs. Furthermore, AVG Antivirus gets paid by inserting an ad for itself at the bottom of all outgoing email messages. If you don't want ads in your email, but you still want to use AVG Antivirus, your option is the AVG Antivirus Professional edition, currently sold at $39.95, or a different program. Beware that some features in the Pro version is not available in the adware version. Those are: - Basic user Interface only (Pro version has Advanced user Interface) - Disabled Advanced Scheduling of Tests (Pro version has Advanced Scheduling) - Disabled Creating of Your Own Tests

NOTE: The adware edition is not available for most users from European countries. AVG checks which country you're from before you're allowed to download the software. You can bypass this by using a proxy server based in America.

AVG Antivirus doesn't scan several of the most common archive formats, whether those files are single level, nested or self-extracting archives. We are also worried by the fact that if AVG Antivirus detects an infected file, it doesn't continue to check the rest of the file for any additional viruses.

A final warning about AVG Antivirus:
According to the vendors website the free edition is only updated once a month! You might think this is good enough. Think again. Every month hundreds of new viruses emerges, flooding the internet. Those viruses are known as ITW-viruses (in the wild/commonly spread viruses). Users who don't have the opportunity to update their antivirus software at least on a weekly bases, are left completely unprotected from all those viruses, - until an update is available.

It's important to be aware of the fact that antivirus software has a very limited ability to detect new and unknown viruses, they usually detects between 15% and 50%. Testing has put AVG Antivirus in the lower range, with only a 15%-20% detection rate.

AVG 6 starts automatically with Windows and runs in the background, providing real-time virus protection. It has a very low overhead and seems to be extremely unobtrusive. At no time did the system seem to run slower or exhibit any problems with AVG running in the background which is something you can't say about some commercial antivirus software.