AVG Antivirus is available as AVG 7 Professional/Enterprise Edition and AVG 6.0 Free Edition. I’ve been a fan of AVG 6.0 Free antivirus for a long time (ever since the older Chip magazine featured it on a cover CD). Therefore, throughout this review, AVG should be taken as AVG 6.0 Free Edition unless stated otherwise. The Free Edition can be downloaded from the website https://grisoft.com and registration key for it is sent by email after free registration. The free version is only for single home use computer. For other purposes, the updated version, AVG 7.0 is available and this review does not reflect the performance of AVG 7.0, which I’ve never used.
AVG has four main components,
1) the resident shield that is running in the background all the time and scanning files as they are accessed
2) The control center which also runs in the background by default and is needed for scanning outlook express mails. running scheduled tests and automatic updates.
3) The main program through which one may run virus scan and cleanup on demand.
4) The right click context menu item through which any file/folder may be scanned for viruses (but not cleaned).
The best thing I like about AVG is that unlike McAfee and Norton antivirus suites, AVG is very light on resources. I’ve used AVG on a Celeron 266, 128MB RAM machine and on an AthlonXP 1800+, 768MB RAM machine and the experience was same. And it has a decent virus detection rate.
Coupled with Sygate Personal Firewall, I’ve had a virus situation going out of control only once in my nearly 2-3 years of experience with it (and even then it was an unpatched Windows XP Pro, a ’virus magnet’, running with a firewall configured to allow all traffic). The AVG Control Center that runs in the background is a bit heavier than the resident shield. But it can be stopped from running everytime using Windows’ msconfig tool, without affecting the resident shield’s scanning in any way.
The downside is that email scanning, scheduled scans and automatic downloads will not be possible then. More on these features below though.
Updates for AVG are available regularly from the website for manual downloading and updating, which is no trouble at all. Just check your current virus pattern number, download the correct update and copy it to the Updates sub-folder in the AVG program folder. The updates are comparatively small in size too, which is good for those on slow internet connections.
The full system scan rate is very fast even when I select the options to scan every file (not just executables) and inside archives. Resident shield too can be configured to scan all file extensions and use heuristics.
AVG vs AVast 4.1 home edition
AVast 4.1 home edition is another free antivirus solution for home use which is worthy of mentioning here. If you compare the two, scan speed is one param where AVG beats AVast hands down with all options being similar (complete system scan of all extensions and inside archives). AVG also appears to have a more easy to use interface than AVast, but that might be because I’m so used to AVG. However, Avast comes with much more features than AVG including instant messaging and IRC virus protection, better support for email clients, virus recovery database etc. The price is a higher resource usage!
AVG has its negatives however which might make it unsuitable for everyone. For one thing, its simply not good enough for an office environment (in any case, the free version is not meant for office use). It cannot scan email in mail clients other than Outlook Express 5 and above, Outlook, Eudora and The Bat. This however is not the end of the world. The only difference is that if antivirus works with the email software, the mail and its attachments are scanned before downloading. Without a plugin like that, the mail is downloaded first and if it turns out to carry a virus, the resident shield will block access to it anyways and the main program can be used to clean/remove it.
Secondly, the automatic updates feature reportedly does not work well enough. Ive not used it myself though, since I always prefer downloading manually.
There is an option for AVG resident shield, to ask the user about what step to take when a virus is detected (clean/delete/quarantine etc.). Now whenever this option flashed in WinME, my computer had a BSOD. This does not happen in Win2k or XP though. In WinME therefore, I had to keep this option safely disabled.
There is no technical support for it. Tech support is only available for the paid/commercial versions though a set of frequently asked questions (faq) is maintained for free edition users.
In the latest virus benchmark/testing (https://virus.gr/english/fullxml/default.asp?id=67&mnu=67 ) AVG 7.0 managed a position of 25 in the total 50 antivirus programs tested. AVG 6.0 was not tested while AVast 4.1 managed to reach the 23rd position! One of the reasons for this might be that in the environment used by testers (a virus ’zoo’) antivirus softwares with more than one scan engine always score much more than those with a single scan engine.
To conclude, AVG 6.0 Free is a decent antivirus solution for home use if you are looking for a freeware option that has decent detection, light resource usage and you don’t want everything automated. But atleast keep one more free antivirus alongside for on-demand scanning. It might be AVast (without enabling it’s memory resident features) or Bitdefender free version (has no resident protection in free edition) or FProt for DOS. And never forget the firewall, even if you are using a commercial antivirus.
PS: A latest BETA version of the free edition is also available on download and is reported by the Grisoft website as a completely new generation product. Don’t get this beta version unless you are feeling really adventurous and are prepared to take the risk (and probably pay the price). Im downloading it right now :)