Avast Avira or Avg??

philng

Which is the best? & Why?

DCFC79

avast and avira for me, the 2 of are easy to use and they dont seem to hog system resources like avg does (thats what it was like for me)

dogmaryxx

Assume your asking about free versions. Test all three and decide for yourself. Following extracts from Lee Seats, for About.com may help but all posters will have different comments to make.

. Avast Home Edition Free AntivirusI have to crown Avast as the overall best free antivirus for, among other reasons, having excellent virus and spyware detection rates according to antivirus test results from AV-Test.org.


Avast antivirus manages to provide a simple and functional user interface, while also being very customizable and feature complete. The active protection feature monitors seven different ways that a virus could enter your computer, including Web browsing, email, file sharing, and more. Avast also features scanning on boot up if you choose to do so. That's something you don't want to do on every boot as it takes quite a while. However, if you suspect you have been exposed to a virus or spyware it is the best way to detect and remove active infections.

2. Avira Personal Free Antivirus

Avira is another one of the best free antivirus products, but it is not as full featured as Avast. The free version of Avira doesn't claim to protect against spyware, but I believe there is some crossover between what is defined as a virus and as spyware. If you want to make sure you are covered for spyware you can use something like SuperAntiSpyware which also has a free version.

Avira has an attractive interface, but it needed more tweaking to get things to function the way I wanted than did Avast. According to AV-Test.org Avira rates slightly higher than Avast for virus detection. However, if the spyware tests were run on the free version of Avira the score would be very low since they reserve the antispyware feature for the paid version.

3. AVG Antivirus Free Edition

AVG is the most popular and one of the best free antivirus software products. AVG has a very polished user interface and is easy and comfortable to use. AVG detects both viruses and spyware in the free edition. However, in the test mentioned above the detection rate is a little lower than Avast or Avira.


The main thing that puts AVG last in my choices for best free antivirus is the amount of functionality left out of the free version verses the the paid version of the software. You still get good basic protection, but Avast and Avari cover more of the infection pathways than does AVG. All three of these best free antivirus choices can be easily installed and uninstalled. You can feel free to try all of them to choose your favorite.

bonzer

Never noticed the resource hogging problem with AVG, but one thing it does do which annoys me is about every 6 months they launch a pop-up every few days on startup trying to flog you the pay version. Last time it seemed to be about a month before it stopped appearing.

The other thing Grisoft (AVG) do is sometimes instead of auto updating, they occasionally force you to go to their web site and find the free version and download and install the whole thing again. Maybe once every year or so. This is obviously again to try and persuade you to buy the pay version. This makes it a bit less suitable for installation on non-techy relatives PCs as they can't always cope with doing that.

Can anyone comment on how the others do on keeping quiet and not nagging you?

Isn't there a Microsoft one coming out shortly as well which will presumably be free? Called Morro or something?

Gers

bonzer wrote: »

Can anyone comment on how the others do on keeping quiet and not nagging you?

I've Avira installed and just on the verge of binning it because of the large half screen pop-ups urging me to buy - at least twice a week if not more. Really annoying!

bonzer

Gers wrote: »

I've Avira installed and just on the verge of binning it because of the large half screen pop-ups urging me to buy - at least twice a week if not more.

Oh right. Maybe I'll quit complaining about AVG then! :rolleyes:

KingL

I ditched AVG because of resource hogging. There's a file in it called avgrsx.exe that causes havoc for some people and doesn't for others. Google it for cases.

I'm using avira now which seems fine. There is one nag screen each time it does a virus definitions update. Apparently you can disable that with http://www.elitekiller.com/files/disable_antivir_nag.htm

DCFC79

Gers wrote: »

I've Avira installed and just on the verge of binning it because of the large half screen pop-ups urging me to buy - at least twice a week if not more. Really annoying!

you might be able to get rid of them messages, not sure but i tihnk the question was asked on the forums

KingL

DCFC79 wrote: »

you might be able to get rid of them messages, not sure but i tihnk the question was asked on the forums

it's answered in post #7 !

[Deleted User]

Surely the question here has to be answered in terms of which is the most successful at finding viruses?!

If this is the case then have a look here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Click on main comparatives then read both PDF documents.

In summary you'll find Avira has the highest % (69%) of pro-actively finding new / unknown viruses using something called heuristics. AVG (45%) and Avast (42%). If you then go on to read the main report you'll find Avira has a total detection rate of 99.7% with Avast at 98.2% and AVG at a poor 93%.

False positives are all very similar with AVG getting only 17, Avira 24 and Avast 28. To put this into context between 0 - 15 is classed as low, and 16 - 100 is high.

As you can see based simply on the ability to find viruses / malware etc Avira is the best. It's free. It doesn't hog resources. Why choose anything else?

Pop ups you say?

Read this: http://www.elitekiller.com/files/disable_antivir_nag.htm

Finally an interesting video comparing the 3 on youtube:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KhXZo3dHulc

patman99

Avast (free edition) is only second to Kaspersky (paid-for) in the virus detection stakes. You do however, have to remember to re-apply for a key every year or it will stop working.

BTW, wouldn't touch MS's AV solutions, not that they are rubbish, but I have no faith in an AV program that waits until everything else has loaded before loading itself. All the others set themselves to boot before windows loads the network drivers, thus as soon as the LAN port is active, you are protected.