Today, as I continue my series on what I believe could be the best free antivirus programs you can install this year, I am looking at the free version of Avast antivirus.

Avast free Antivirus

After choosing the free antivirus program through the official site I was taken to cnet.com to complete the download.

From there, the whole process of downloading and installing Avast antivirus was so quick that I missed the opportunity to grab any screenshots!

After installation I left my laptop alone for a couple of minutes to start writing this article on my desktop and then almost jumped – the program notified me that it had automatically updated itself with a voice message!

Avast Free Antivirus

Being a free antivirus program means that this offering from Avast misses out on some of the features that can be found in either the paid version or the internet security suite offered by the company, namely -

• the sandbox technology
• firewall
• anti-spam
• protection for 3 pcs

- so the program you end up with is slightly limited in comparison to some of the competition.

That said, it runs very well indeed and does have some nice features.

One of the things I like here is the gaming mode which prevents Avast antivirus from popping up when you are in the middle of trying to blow someone away in your favourite first person shooter.

This is something that is missing from many other av programs I’ve tried, including the one I use all the time on my desktop.

Scanning Performance

As ever, I ran a scan with this antivirus program to see how it performed in terms of memory and CPU usage and whether that affected the usability of my machine.

Avast is light on system resources

Memory-wise, the program used about 9 megs of memory.

As for CPU, usage was only around 10-15% on both cores which is the best I’ve seen from a free antivirus program thus far.

Using other programs whilst Avast was running a scan showed no slowdown whatsoever.

Final Thoughts

The main page when you open up the antivirus program has a large advert on it for the paid version but I have become accustomed to that now – these security vendors all look to make the upssell off of their free products and that is to be expected.

Most free antivirus programs seem to encourage upgrades to the paid versions

Avast is quick to download, very quick to install and incredibly simple to use.

It doesn’t have all the features that I see in the program I use on my desktop – F-Secure Internet Security 2010 – but it does what it says it will very well indeed.

Of the free antivirus programs I’ve tried so far, this is the best.

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – Avast Free Antivirus is a post from: Security FAQs

If you surf on over to the BitDefender site you can download one of two free antivirus programs – BitDefender 10 Free Edition or the full version of BitDefender Antivirus 2010.

The latter is free too but you have to complete a TrialPay offer to get it.

I’m not one to jump through hoops as I have little time on my hands so this review will be about the former of the two products.

BitDefender 10 Free Edition

On clicking the download button I was taken to a page that asked for my email address so that the download link could be sent to me which was a bit of a pain as I haven’t set any email accounts up on the machine I use for these reviews.

Oh well, thankfully I have Gmail for times like these and 155kB later I was ready to install my new free BitDefender antivirus product.

Interestingly, during setup, BitDefender recommended removing any other security products that may be on my system – sound advice – and the first time I’ve seen an antivirus program suggest it.

BitDefender free antivirus offers good security advice

Moving on, the first screen you will see after you’ve run setup will be one that gives you the option to upgrade.

Having run through a few free antivirus programs now I guess I’m getting used to the vendors looking for the up-sell and it has to be expected really as, like all businesses, they need to make some dollars somewhere.

BitDefender offers upgrade early on

Why Do I Need To Create An Account???

Next up you have to create an account on BitDefender.com, and then verify your email address, which seems like an unnecessary task to me as none of the other free antivirus programs I’ve tried thus far have needed to know my email address in order to serve me with updates to the program.

You can opt out of receiving updates from BitDefender though and so I did just that.

why does BitDefender do this?

Interestingly, after all that, I then ran the program and was able to update it anyway, before verifying my email address.

Strange.

Whats more, after my BitDefender account was confirmed it said I could use the product free for 399 days whilst the antivirus program itself said 365 days.

Confused?

I am.

Anyway, running a scan showed that BitDefender 10 Free Edition which, incidentally, is called BitDefender 2009 on my installation(??) uses about 11 megs of memory which isn’t too bad.

CPU usage, which I have found to be both important and extremely variable between other antivirus programs, was all over the place, ranging from 10% on both cores up to about 80% on both.

BitDefender CPU usage

Despite those sometimes high figures the scan did not have a noticeably negative impact on me running other programs at the same time so thats a plus.

Overall I found BitDefender 10 Free Edition to be… confusing I guess.

I couldn’t see why I needed to create an account on BitDefender.com in order to receive updates and the program seems a little unsure as to it’s own identity.

Furthermore, there is some confusion as to how long it can be used for as well.

BitDefender 10 Free Edition identity crisis?

It runs ok, though the available options for scanning are very scarce.

If I was looking for a free antivirus program I doubt I would choose this one.

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – BitDefender 10 Free Edition is a post from: Security FAQs

There was a time, not so long ago, maybe even last week, when people thought that the only computers that could get viruses were those that ran Microsoft’s family of operating systems.

Hopefully they are wiser now.

Its true, though, that machines running Microsoft Windows are probably more susceptible to malware than other operating systems, purely because of the size of the installed user base.

Therefore, if you use Windows 7 or one of the older versions of Windows, you will want an antivirus program installed.

What better choice, then, than a free program made by Microsoft themselves?

Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials Free Antivirus

Microsoft Security Essentials is suitable for anyone running one of the following versions of Windows -

• Windows XP 32-bit
• Windows Vista 32-bit
• Windows Vista 64-bit
• Windows 7 32-bit
• Windows 7 64-bit

Once you’ve downloaded the installer from the Microsoft page you need to run the application.

There are the usual terms and conditions to read and then agree to before the big M checks that your copy of Windows is a genuine one.

Assuming you have a legit copy of Windows, MSE will install itself very quickly indeed and will then go straight into an update which isn’t bad practice at all.

MSE antivirus updates itself straight after installation

Once that update is complete you will be able to check out the features that Microsoft Security Essentials has to offer.

Said features are a little sparse when compared to other antivirus programs you may pay for but are certainly good enough for a free program (hopefully you can see them in the screenshot below).

One thing I would recommend you do straight away is to click on ‘Advanced’ and then put a tick in “Scan removable drives” as this is off by default.

Doing so will protect you from some nasty viruses, such as Conficker, that are often spread through removable drives.

MSE features

Performance was the next thing I looked at, by running a scan and Task Manager together.

It was pleasing to see that MSE only used about 4 megs of memory during the process.

CPU usage wasn’t bad either – it used around 35% of the CPU on average but that was mainly on just one core so running other programs in the background was no problem at all.

Microsoft Security Essentials resource usage

Whether or not Microsoft Security Essentials is the right antivirus program for you or not is a personal decision of course – you may decide you need more features in which case you want one of the (paid for) top 10 antivirus programs.

If free antivirus suits your budget better then you could do far worse than MSE.

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – MSE – Microsoft Security Essentials is a post from: Security FAQs

AVG Free is probably one of the most well-known and well-used free antivirus programs on the market today.

When you visit the official site (linked to above) you will discover that AVG offers three main products -

1. AVG Anti-Virus Free
2. AVG Anti-Virus 9.0
3. AVG Internet Security 9.0

The first of those, the subject of this review, is free whilst the other require payment.

Comparing the product features between the three products reveals that the free program offers good but basic protection which is pretty much the case with most free antivirus products.

The setup program for AVG Free is quickly downloaded – its available through CNET and is only 2.0MB in size.

AVG Free

Once the installer begins it quickly prompts you to choose between the free or  paid versions which I personally found annoying as I thought I had downloaded the free one anyway, but I’m sure it makes good business sense for the vendor.

Needless to say, I downloaded the free version, a task which was completed in just over a minute.

Installation was then easy but the program then offered me the chance to install the AVG toolbar and to make Yahoo my homepage – a useful extra for some people, perhaps, but incredibly annoying to those of use who download many, many programs that want to install ‘extras’ all of the time.

AVG Toolbar installation

Anyway, once the program has installed it will then grab the latest virus definitions so that your computer will be fully protected.

Opening the program up shows that various security components are installed such as -

• Anti-Virus
• Anti-Spyware
• Link Scanner
• E-Mail Scanner
• Resident Shield
• Update Manager

I’m only interested in the antivirus component today and that offers a few simple choices – scan your whole computer or selected parts now or schedule a scan for a future time and date.

AVG scan in operation

I went for an immediate scan and was surprised that throughout the process AVG Free only used about 8 Megs of RAM which is considerably lower than many other alternatives I have tried recently.

CPU usage seems rather hiigh – my machine was recording about 64% on both cores during the scanning process but performance seemed ok anyway, unlike the results I had with Panda Cloud Antivirus recently.

Overall I like AVG Free.

There are a couple of issues that niggle me – the company are obviously looking for the upsell and I hate having programs try to get me to install toolbars / change homepages.

That said, these don’t affect the product’s performance in any way and the whole point in having an antivirus program is to protect your computer – AVG Free does that job well, doesn’t impact your system resources too much and doesn’t cost a penny either.

This one is definitely worth checking out if you want a free antivirus program.

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – AVG Free is a post from: Security FAQs

If you have any experience in fixing your own computer than at one point in time you have probably had to use a Boot CD to repair something that was wrong with your operating system.

Most of the time it was some type of infection but it could also be other problems such as a file that was configured wrongly or that had became corrupted.

Boot CD’s could be a pain to deal with but most of the time they were able to get the job done.

Even though the Boot CD has never left the computer repair public conscience it has been replaced somewhat by other methods that people could use to fix a problem on their computer.

These methods include the ever popular bootable thumb drive but now we have a resurrection of sorts with the release of the AVG Rescue CD.

It has everything that you would need to save a PC that has been infected by a virus.

using the AVG Rescue CD to repair a borked system

The AVG Rescue CD

The CD has several technologies that you can use to save a PC that is on the ropes from infections.

It is hard to be able to use a computer once it has been infected with a very bad virus.

Trying to do work on such a system can be a forlorn task.

That includes trying to clean out the infected files from inside of the computer.

So to be able to get the infection off of the computer you have to boot up from another device and not the hard drive.

After you boot up from this other device you can now look at the host drive from a different perspective than just your main system’s hard drive.

You can now run a scan on the system without worrying about the results being compromised.

The boot disk is acting as if it was a second computer and your hard drive has nothing to do with it.

It can clean whatever is wrong with the disk and allow you to boot up once more.

The AVG Rescue CD Deals With More Than Just Viruses

The AVG Rescue CD will handle more than just a bad virus.

If you have a bad case of spyware on your computer and you want to make sure that you got all of it out then you should reach for this CD as well.

It may be able to reach places that your normal anti-spyware cannot.

It also has a whole host of other system recovery tools that will allow you to get to the bottom of anything else that is wrong with your system.

There is no need to tolerate a system that is messed up if you do not have to.

Using the AVG Rescue CD can allow your computer to experience a second chance at life.

Just when you may have thought it was dead, taken over by the bad guys, AVG gives it mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Just remember that from this point on, do what you can to secure your computer.

How Can I Use The AVG Rescue CD To Clean An Infected Windows Installation? is a post from: Security FAQs

In this post I will be continuing my look at what I believe to be the top 10 free antivirus programs in 2010.

This week I have said goodbye to PC Tools Antivirus Free and had another look at Panda Cloud Antivirus, a solution I was less than impressed with last time I used it.

That was because Panda Cloud AV almost locked my computer up with it’s excessively high CPU usage.

To be fair, that edition of the program I was using was a beta and the CPU usage was a known issue.

A year on, have things changed?

Panda Cloud Antivirus installation

Panda Cloud Antivirus

The last time I tested Panda Cloud Antivirus I used my main desktop pc which has a rather nippy 3.3Ghz quad core processor and a ton of RAM.

Today I am using my slightly older 1.8Ghz dual core laptop which only has 1GB of RAM and is running Windows Vista.

If the issues I encountered before were still present then this time around the performance would be far worse.

Installation

The installation process was very easy indeed, totally painless, and very quick.

From visiting the web site to having the antivirus program completely installed took less than a minute I would guess and that is despite the fact that my kids were eating bandwidth at the time too.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is quick to install

After choosing the free installation option I was ready to run my first scan, hopeful that any speed issues I may have had before were a thing of the past.

Hmmm….

As you’ll see in the next shot, I opened up task manager so that I could monitor my CPU usage whilst running an ‘optimized scan’.

From start to finish, my CPU usage never dropped below 29% and I think I saw it peak at 86%.

Optimized scan and CPU usage

I find this curious as I am running a totally fresh installation of Vista – besides Panda Cloud Antivirus and the operating system there is nothing else running.

Whatsoever.

And I have 2 cores!

Oh well, at least it wasn’t using 100% of the CPU and the scan did complete reasonably quickly.

That said, it was labelled as an optimized scan so I thought I really ought to run a regular scan too -

Panda Cloud AV regular scan

This time around, the program was to scan my entire computer which shouldn’t take long, I thought, as there is pretty well nothing on my hard drive right now.

Oops.

Wrong!

At the time of writing the scan is only 5% complete and has been running for 86 minutes!

CPU usage is somewhat different this time, running between 8% and 96% though, interestingly, it seems to be utilising just the one core this time.

Conclusion

Maybe I’m missing something here but the amount of time taken to scan my system seems to be way off from what I would have anticipated.

CPU usage still seems much higher than I am used to with other antivirus programs, though significantly better than what I experienced with the old beta version.

I didn’t have any viruses on my system to test the program with but it did find some tracking cookies so it was effective there at least.

Overall though I still don’t like Panda Cloud Antivirus which is a shame because I really wanted to – I have experience of paid-for products from Panda and they have always impressed me and have been ideal for my kids’ machines.

This offering from Panda, however, has already been purged from my laptop which is disappointing really as I believe many people do enjoy a good and safe experience with it.

If you give Panda Cloud Antivirus a go then please do let me know how it works for you as I do wonder if there is something about my own personal configuration that has an impact upon it’s performance.

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – Panda Cloud Antivirus is a post from: Security FAQs

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – when it comes to internet security products you typically get what you pay for.

Having used many paid-for antivirus and other programs I am certain that the non-free versions tend to be better in terms of both effectiveness and usability.

That does not mean, however, that free antivirus programs do not have their place – for some users, especially casual internet users, they may be all that is required.

Over the next few weeks I shall be looking at what I believe to be the top 10 free antivirus programs of 2010.

The 10 antivirus programs I have chosen will be appear in no particular order.

First up then is…

PC TOOLS Antivirus Free Edition

PC TOOLS Antivirus Free Edition offers the typical level of protection that you would expect from a free security program such as -

• Protection from viruses, worms and trojans
• Real-time protection
• Regular updates

If you wish to try PC TOOLS Antivirus Free Edition then you need a quick 33.6MB download to get started.

Setting up the product takes a little longer -  about 3 minutes in my case – as the program searches for the latest updates during the installation process which is, of course, not a bad thing.

Once the installation process completed the program then launched itself into an instant scan of my system.

pc tools antivirus scan

As it began I went to make myself a coffee only to be disturbed by a loud buzzing noise coming from my laptop which turned out to be due to the fact that the program had discovered something – 2 threats and 33 infections.

What PC TOOLS antivirus had found was nothing more sinister than tracking cookies though.

Sure, I didn’t want them on my laptop but, even so, I thought the buzzing was a little overkill!!

pc tools scan results

Nonetheless, the program worked effectively which is all I was hoping for.

PC TOOLS Antivirus Free is suitable for the following platforms -

• Windows XP (Service Pack 2 or later)
• Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 or later) 32-bit and 64-bit
• Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit

As you may imagine, the free edition is light on additional features and does seem rather keen to promote the fully paid version which does offer far more functionality.

PC Tools AntiVirus more information

Read about the other contenders for the top 10 free antivirus programs 2010.

The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – PC Tools Antivirus Free is a post from: Security FAQs

If you have a computer that is connected to the web then it is essential that you have an antivirus program set up and running full time.

There are so many new dangers that are out there that one has to make sure that they are always safe when they are surfing the internet.

But, occasionally, even the best laid plans can go astray.

This can happen to your antivirus software as well.

There are times when your antivirus software will give out a false positive even though the item that is just scanned is safe.

There are a couple of reasons that this happens – some are legitimate mistakes, while others are fake scans that are done on purpose.

In this article I will go over both types:

Hash Number Confusion And Code Behaviour

When your antivirus software gives out a false positive on a piece of software a lot of times this happens because of how antivirus software works in general.

The software has a database of what it calls signatures that is stored on your computer.

These are the same signatures that you get when you (hopefully) download an update of the software every day.

There are always new threats that are out there so these signatures must always be updated.

antivirus false positives

The signature itself is nothing more than a hash number of a certain piece of code that the virus may have.

When the scanner sees this code, it reports it as a piece of malware and tries to get rid of it.

Sometimes legitimate code will have this same hash and the antivirus will report a false positive.

Other times it is the behaviour that a certain piece of code has.

Some antivirus software that is out on the market will not only track the signature of the code, but the behaviour of the code as well.

There are certain behaviours that the code might exhibit that will set the alarms off on the antivirus software.

Even though the software may have your permission to do what it is doing, the antivirus may still activate anyway.

This is another way that legitimate software may be labeled bad as well.

Keyword Triggers

One last way that your antivirus program can report a false positive is that it is on the lookout for certain keyword in the title of the software.

Some antivirus software will report a virus on any piece of software that is labeled a keygen.

There have been so many reported instances of viruses being in software like this that they just skip the middle man and do not bother to scan it – they just automatically see it as being guilty.

There are unconfirmed reports that some antivirus companies take payola when it comes to reports as well.

This means that if they scan a crack or keygen to a big company’s software then they will automatically say that the software is bad because they are paid to do so. Allegedly. Perhaps.

So these are the reasons why your antivirus program will at times give out a false positive.

Even so, it is still better to trust your antivirus software than not.

Why Does My Antivirus Program Sometimes Give Out False Positives? is a post from: Security FAQs

Have you ever wondered which antivirus program is the fastest or which uses the least system resources?

I know I have, especially as I found one that was a real resource hog last year (though, to be fair, it was a beta version).

Well recently Anti-Malware.ru did just that, basing their findings on both raw speed and the level of system resources utilised.

The antivirus programs run through the tests were -

• Avast
• AVG
• Avira
• BitDefender
• Dr.Web
• Eset
• F-Secure
• Kaspersky
• McAfee
• Microsoft
• Norton
• Outpost
• Panda
• Sophos
• Trend Micro
• VirusBlokAda

(You can learn more about many of the above in my ‘top 10 antivirus for 2010‘ post)

If you read their article you’ll see that they put various antivirus programs through a large number of tests to measure performance in many different settings such as -

1. Operation system boot time.
2. Memory & CPU used by antivirus software.
3. File copying performance (on-access antivirus scanner performance testing).
4. Scan speed (on-demand antivirus scanner performance testing).
5. Boot time for the five most popular office applications.

- I’ll let you read the detail, via the link at the beginning of this post, for yourself as it is quite in-depth.

Overall it looks like Avira performed very well in all the tests with the programs from other vendors getting mixed results depending on the particular operation being performed.

What is your experience with your antivirus program like?

Is it quick enough or do you find it sluggish in operation?

Which 2010 Antivirus Programs Are The Fastest? is a post from: Security FAQs

If you’ve ever fallen foul of a computer virus then you will know just how big a problem they are, and how hard they are to remove.

They also cause a huge amount of frustration, making your computer a nightmare to deal with.

Therefore, if you believe you are infected with a virus right now, you may well be tempted to rush out and get any old antivirus program straight away.

What if your computer now handily pops messages up onto your screen, telling you that you are infected, and offering the solution?

Would you buy that solution so that you can put your mind at ease and fix your computer immediately?

I hope not!

The Nocebo Effect On The Web

The reason why I say that is because what I described above is fake antivirus, not the real deal.

Fake antivirus is a huge problem and it is growing rapidly.

In fact, researchers at Google recently released a report called ‘The Nocebo Effect On The Web’ which discovered that have been an ever increasing number of cases in which users were tricked into purchasing fake antivirus software.

Malware has been around pretty well since the web was first created and there are thousands, if not millions, of variants in circulation at any one time.

It is incredible, then, to think that around 15% of all that malware is of the fake antivirus variety.

So big is the problem that fake av is also pushed via malvertising (malware delivered through adverts on the web) to the point where it accounts for 50% of all such malvertising, a 500% increase on last year.

Furthermore, according to the report, the number of domains that Google detected as hosting fake antivirus software went from 93 in January 2009 up to 587 in January 2010.

Countering Fake Antivirus

If you get duped into buying fake antivirus then the money you’ve thrown away may be only one of many problems you encounter – such programs may themselves install further malware with the intention of stealing your identity and monitoring all of your web activity.

Ironically, according to Google’s report, the most effective means of avoiding fake antivirus is to utilise some kind of virus detection mechanism in the first place.

Naturally, you will want to avoid the scams and get a product from a reputable vendor – I’d recommend checking out my post about the best 10 antivirus programs of 2010.

The Nocebo Effect On The Web : Rise Of The Fake Antivirus is a post from: Security FAQs