AVG Free Antivirus

Editor's Review

AVG Free Antivirus - Things We Like

The AVG Antivirus Free version is used by many millions across the world and in part thanks to this wide coverage combined with AVG's expertise which goes into their paid products, AVG Antivirus is a highly sensitive antivirus product. It has a broader detection library than many competing products along with advanced heuristics to detect many existing threats as well as new and previously unseen ones. Being free is very impressive for such a complete anti-virus package, the detections are superior to other free anti-virus offerings and even beat commercial products such as Norton Anti-virus. Another impressive feature is the speed at which AVG scans files to find infections, completing a scan in a fraction of the time many other free anti-viral programs need. The AVG Antivirus download is fairly small and quickly installs and updates itself, at only 30 megabytes in size it is one of the smallest anti-virus programs available. Users find the interface easy to understand in AVG Antivirus review comments.

AVG Free Antivirus - Things We Didn't Like

When using the internet browsing safety function which monitors all of your online activity the processor load seemed unacceptably high with constant scanning activity resulting in large CPU usage spikes on a mid-range laptop. This constant processing load also kept the processor at a higher than necessary temperature for an activity as simple as browsing the web. While the heuristics give some peace of mind their detections are often wrong, highlighting innocent programs as infected. There is an element of suspicion, which applies to all commercial anti-virus products, that they are inclined to flag as many things as possible as threats to encourage customers to pay for protection. A comparison of response speeds to new threats found AVG were one of the slower companies to release detection updates to cover newly identified threats meaning your detection database may not be as effective as it should be.