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Avast! Professional Edition Review: Internet Security Software |
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| Highly rated anti-virus; boot-time scan; no link scanner or password vault; exclusive discount | |
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[Editor's Note: Avast! is currently offering 25% off the regular price of $39.95. No coupon is needed, just follow any link from NextAdvisor.com. Offer expires December 8th, 2009]
Avast! caught our attention not just because of its association with nautical lingo (Avast comes from the Dutch for 'Hold fast!'). It's a product that we see mentioned quite a bit on antivirus bulletin boards. They've actually been in the game for a while, since 1988 in fact, when the products were only available in their home country of Czechoslovakia. Since then it's developed a loyal following.
Setup of Avast! Professional Edition was extremely easy, and one of the first things we noticed about Avast! was the initial scan. It may take some users back to the days of DOS; there are no fancy graphics of files going under a magnifying glass, no spinning logos or bouncing balls. Instead, since it runs at boot-time (after restart), you get simple text read-outs. Not the most attractive interface, but theoretically this scan will detect viruses before they've even launched in the Windows environment. It also runs faster. It did not, however, uncover anything that Norton, our previous security software had missed. The second thing we noticed about Avast is the user interface, and this time it wasn't a good thing: first it's divided between a control panel in the control strip, and the Avast Simple User Interface. It's hardly "simple" and the default "skin" on the latter looks like a media player from 2001. There's another interface option included that's better, but not by much. The control-strip module which controls many of the basic security functions is easier to use, though frustratingly clunky and short on explanation. Why these are separate modules is beyond us. The term "award-winning" gets thrown around a lot when discussing anti-virus products. However, for Avast! it's not marketing hyperbole. They routinely score well in independent virus detection tests. It's hard to say then why our experience was so much different. Avast! missed an image-based trojan and allowed us to download a malware flash plugin that's rather well-known. The protection kicked in a few times with an audible siren and a voice telling us a trojan had been detected. This will boil down to personal taste, but we found it irritating. Avast's url blocker is less well-developed than most that we've tested recently. There's no ever-present toolbar, which may be off-putting to some. Similarly there's no link scanner for Google or Yahoo!, something that seems to have become de rigeur for Internet security software. Another common feature not found with Avast is an identity theft protection vault. Also absent are any parental controls. But those that use Limewire may be comforted by P2P protection (something we didn't test). Though many people like Avast, for us it felt clunky and disjointed. In fact, it's hard not to overstate how much we disliked using the software. While our virus intercept tests aren't infallible, we didn't like how it performed in the handful of threats we threw at it, nor are we crazy about the voice that announces when virus definitions have been updated or a virus has been discovered. Also worth mentioning is the fact that it did not play well with the windows security advisor. While there are work-arounds out there, none of them worked for our machine running Vista. System Requirements: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 7 |
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| Price: | $29.96/yr (after 25% discount) |
| Virus Protection: | Antivirus kernal detects "in the wild" viruses; virus chest; integrated Virus Cleaner |
| Adware and Spyware Protection: | West Coast Lab certified anti-spyware |
| Identity Theft Protection: | No credit card/login protection; ID theft protection through anti-spyware |
| Spam and Phishing Protection: | Email scanner; Heuristic analysis of messages; Outlook plugin |
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