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Grisoft AVG Free Edition 7.1

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Pros
Free
Cons
Mediocre heuristics

Grisoft AVG Free Edition 7.1 Review

by Tony Bradley

This antivirus program lacks key features and adequate heuristics.

None of the three free antivirus products tested for the "The New Virus Fighters" ranked highly, but Grisoft's AVG Antivirus Free Edition holds the distinct honor of having placed last among all ten paid and free contenders due to a clunky interface, the omission of significant features, and below-average performance.

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The main interface provides just three options: Scan Computer, Scan Selected Areas, and Check For Updates. Options on the console's left panel, such as the Scheduler, lead to notifications that the features you seek exist only in the paid version of the product, AVG Professional.

In our performance tests, AVG Free Edition ranked second to last. (Alwil Software's free Avast Home Edition ranked last.) While AVG Free Edition caught nearly 100 percent of bots and zombies in our collection of zoo malware, it caught a disappointing 65 percent of Trojan horses. It ranked second-to-last in our heuristics tests--detecting just 11 percent of worms and 8 percent of backdoor programs using one-month-old virus data.

Upshot: Limited features and poor performance make AVG Free Edition an inferior choice even among the free antivirus products.

Tony Bradley

User Reviews for Grisoft AVG Free Edition 7.1

Reviewed by: PCWorld

Duration of ownership: 2 Months

Strengths: test

Weaknesses:

Overall Evaluation:
Reviewed by: Stevechur

Duration of ownership: 1 Year

Strengths: It's Free. I also get updates daily. I'm thinking of trying the paid version.

Weaknesses: Most of the features are in the paid version, but what do want for free!

Overall Evaluation: My ISP gave me McAfee which constantly shut down its firewall, so I removed it or least tried. It is almost impossible to completely remove McAfee. I also bought a new laptop with Norton installed which shut off windows security and is hard to uninstall. AVG free may not be the prettiest Anti-Virus out there but I've had bad experiences with the two big ones. If I decide to go with a suite I know that I will pass on both Norton and McAfee from having used both of them in the past. BTW I've tried to get rid of both of the big two and replace them with freeware.

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