I used to swear for Grisoft AVG Anti-virus 7 Free Edition, and comparisons done some years ago seemed to demostrate that AVG was a great choice in the antivirus field, and it was free. However, lately I’m getting too many false positives (I have my reasons to say they are false positives, long to detail here). Finally I got tired of them, and went to some antivirus comparisons like AV Comparatives and an article on Chip magazine (in german) trying to find which free antivirus was better.
According to the comparatives, AVG has lost the lead, and it doesn’t rank very good among other commercial antivirus programs. Actually, there’s a severe lack of high-profile free antivirus programs. The best seem to be commercial, specially Kaspersky and NOD32 are always among the top five. But, limiting to the free area, besides AVG, there seem to be two apparently better choices. However, I’ve not decided yet.
To consider an antivirus free, I mean a downloadable and installable application which doesn’t need a paid-for license to use, with free unlimited updates. That leaves out any online scanner, which aren’t as online as they say, and trial versions. Free versions with complete detection and removal functionality, but with advanced functionality disabled, are what I would consider. AVG is like that, and I would want no less.
The first one I’ve tried is Avast! 4 Home Edition. It’s free, although you have to register in their site to obtain a license key for the program (for free). You can set it up in several languages, that’s a plus, and it routinely has good scores in antivirus comparisons. The drawback is a very limited and cumbersome interface (the advanced interface is in the commercial version), which totally spoils it for me. It also seems to use too much memory when you disable everything, and that’s not good for people who only do manual scanning like me.
Then I’ve tried Avira AntiVir 7 Personal, with also good scores on the comparatives. It’s free too, although you can only use the english version (other languages are available in the paid-for version). The memory footprint with the permanent protection called Guard disabled is minimal, although I’d prefer if the tray icon went away. The interface is not bad, even though I still prefer AVG. I got some detections on first run (stuff that AVG slipped out) but nothing relevant. So far I’ve liked it better than Avast.
The sad truth is that Avast, AntiVir and AVG, all three of them give false positives in my system. So far I’ve not decided yet if I should change from AVG, and if I do, which other should I pick. Although AVG has the better interface in my opinion, comparatives always put it behind Avast and AntiVir. Well, time will tell.
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