The Top 10 Free Antivirus 2010 – Avast Free Antivirus

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.

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