avast! 4.8 vs. AVG 7.5 (both free)
In a quick review, I think there are some positive and negative sides of both products. Let me explain it for both of the product:
1.avast! Home Edition (version: 4.8, free license)
a. Positives
-Freeware
-Various protection against:
a).Internet mail
b).Instant messaging
c).Network attack
d).Incoming and outgoing email (using Outlook/Exchange)
e).Peer-to-peer (P2P)
f).Computer virus
g).Malicious web (web scanning)
-Can schedule a boot-time scan.
-Configurable. You can configure the scan mode (quick, standard, and thorough), the resident scanner sensitivity (disabled, standard, and high), and many more, depends on what you need.
-Interesting user interface (simple, skin support, etc)
-Has anti-spyware and anti-rootkit edited
b.Negatives
-Offline update file is quite big to download (last checked on update site is 13.76 MB)
-There is no task scheduler for virus scanning.
-You can’t store the scan result, so if you want to scan, you must do it until it finished.
-There is no blocking for malicious web script.
2.AVG Free Edition (version: 7.5, free license)
a.Positives
-Freeware
-You can schedule a virus scan (scheduled tasks).
-Offline update support (you can download the virus database into you computer first and run the update manager, the size depends on the updates).
-Stop and resume capabilities in scanning virus.
-Quite fast scanning for files, using heuristic.
b.Negatives
-Only protects against:
a).Computer virus
b).Incoming and outgoing email (using Outlook/Exchange)
-There is no anti-spyware and firewall protection installed. I hear that AVG 8 has an anti-spyware bundled with the anti-virus program installer.
-There is no anti-rootkit also
-There is no blocking for malicious web script.
-Standard user interface.
-Standard configuration for scanning files.
Overall these two antivirus programs is good, it only depends on what your computer needs. For example, if you always connected to the internet, do many activity in the internet, you might choose to use avast! for your PC anti-virus, or if you are rarely going online, AVG might be the best for you (considering the offline virus database update support). For me, both of this antivirus is fine, as long as it’s free hehehe…
PS: This is only my opinion as a user
ACG Free 8.0 is out now and includes anti-virus, anti-spyware, email scanning, and LinkScanner real-time safe searching technology. I think that pretty much takes care of most of the negatives above!
Yes, I think AVG 8 is way much better than AVG 7.5, especially bundled with anti spyware and LinkScanner technology. Let me download and install it first and maybe I’ll put my opinion about it later. Thanks for your comment.
AVG 8.0 is pretty amazing. I installed avast! recently because I got a trojan. It found some of the files. I unistalled avast and installed AVG 8.0 and avg found about 11 more files that were infected.
I had previously used AVG 7.5 but was discouraged by the way that AVG 7.5 worked. AVG 8.0 is waaaay better. Although, avast seems to have some useful features not included in AVG.
Same with me, I’ve installed Spybot Search & Destroy, but it didn’t detect any malware, but when I scan using AVG 8, I found adwares and malwares from IE cache folder and registry. It’s simply great to have that kind of antivirus and antispyware for free
avast! 4.8 does have antispyware http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-compare-home-professional.html
it also has anti-rootkit – avg 8 does not.
Thanks for your info for avast, I’ll correct my post about this.
If your computer has been accessing the Internet unprotected it is infected. Spyware has surpassed viruses as the #1 threat to identity theft and without protection your Internet activities are never private.