Well, every computer users need at least a basic anti virus to protect their computers from virus/malware attacks. Most of the anti virus companies provide free versions of their security software, in the hope that users may upgrade their services if they like the free versions. It was part of their advertisements to lure and push users to upgrade to their paid products. Sadly, not anymore. These days they all come bundled with lot of unwanted junkwares, adwares, and tracking-wares to make money from the users.
Avira Anti Virus software is no exception. It comes with whole lot of add-ons bundled in its security suite that were of hardly any use, unless you upgrade to PRO versions. The suite has Free Software Updater, Free Phantom VPN, Free System Speed up. Scout Browser and Password manager. No don’t get too excited with all these FREEbies because you have to upgrade to its PRO versions(by paying money for subscriptions of course), to unlock their full potential.
I had been using the free version of Avira Anti Virus for a year, until recently I had to uninstall it from my PC. Being a Windows OS savvy myself, I hardly have ever used any paid version of an anti virus on my PC for 10 years now. Anyway, lately I have been noticing that my computer(running on Win 7) has been running very slow. It was taking more time to boot up as well. I ensured I had freed up some space on the PC and disabled all the start-up items, killed unwanted processes and services from the Task Manager. I accessed my Programs & Features section of the PC and found out that Avira was hogging more than 2 GB of the PC’s memory. And every time I restarted my PC, the first thing I’d noticed on my system’s Task Bar tray is Avira that kept on initializing and it had been asking me to update the software every other day, which was irritating. In case I’d ignore the update notification then Windows would let me know that the anti virus is turned off and my system is at risk. I had to manually turn on Avira many times after updating it.
The problem started when Avira will not update its definition even though I’d initialized the updates couple of times. It gave me an error prompt to contact support. As there are lot of other free security software online, that perform better and has minimal impact on PC, I uninstalled it instead.
After I uninstalled the software, I could see there were lot of residual files of Avira. So I tried to delete every thing by going to the file location/folder, but it didn’t let me delete them. Finally, I had to remove one of its extensions on my browser and deleted all registry entries to be able to delete the residual files. I am sure people who are not very familiar with Windows OS, will find it hard to do these stuff- not just for this particular software. So I will recommend anyone to read the critic ratings/reviews before you install Avira Free anti virus or any other security software.