SharewareOnSale has Ashampoo Anti-Virus 2016 as a giveaway, with a 6 month license. The website does not seem to state when the offer ends. I'm running it now and like it so far. The initial signature update was very slow, taking over half an hour to complete. When the auto update was running, there was no way to check the progress, and I figured it has failed due it taking a long time. I rebooted and manually ran an update. It took over half an hour to complete, but at least when I ran a manual update it showed the upgrade progress, so I could watch the progress as it updated, and could see it was running. It it very light so far in terms of system impact, even when running a scan. However, memory usage is a different story. I'm running a full system scan as I write this, and memory usage is in excess of 400MB, and very occasionally briefly rising to over 500MB. However to put this into perspective, I've got 25 Chrome tabs open as well as a number of programs sitting in the system tray, and Task Manager is showing that total that the total RAM usage for my computer is never exceeding 41%. So, in my case, I can say that the high RAM usage does not concern me, as I've still got a lot of free RAM. Perhaps the high RAM usage is contributing to the very fast scan times. Ashampoo Anti-Virus uses engines from Bitdefender and Emsisoft. I'm somewhat concerned that it failed to detect any malware in a folder with ten samples, considering that Bitdefender itself detects all ten of these, and other products using Bitdefender's engine detect 9 or 10. Perhaps it would have detected these on execution, but I did not want to risk launching malware on my computer.
Ashampoo Anti-Virus have been a 6 month free (it is free trial license) always. Already several years. Home: https://www.ashampoo.com/en/usd/pin/0449/security-software/Ashampoo-Anti-Virus Download: https://cdn1.ashampoo.net/ashampoo/0449/ashampoo_anti-virus_1.3.0_sm.exe Register: https://www.ashampoo.com/frontend/r...fcv3gi2eikp8jytpswwevnlnazolpr&ref=linktarget
AAV seems pretty solid from the reviews I've seen. I plan on using it when the license for my current AV expires.
As an update to my first post. I just scanned 100 random samples from a malware pack and Ashampoo Anti-Viruse detected 92 of these. I scanned the remaining 8 files with VirusTotal and none of these threats were detected by Bitdefender or Emsisoft. So, the detection rate was fine this time. When I scanned the first set of malware which AAV missed, with another product, AAV's realtime protection detected some of them.
No, I didn't want to launch malware on my laptop. I will use one of my laptops for testing malware in the future.
That's right. The "Bitdefender engine" does not equal Bitdefender. Or as you have found out, how independent developers implement the Core SDK. Your differing results from one day to the next should be expected given different samples as well as updated sigs and defs. Anyhow, FYI for everyone: I played around with Ashampoo 1.3.0 last year. And I ran the previous BD/Ikarus version a while back for a year on one of my systems. The usual plugins folder containing the full BD ~900 file set of sigs and defs. Which is why the first install update takes so long. Subsequent updates are incremental. As well, there are a ton of Emsisoft .sig files involved, too. The "Bitdefender engine" is the famous BD Core. Period. Everything else is good old Emsisoft, their most excellent A Squared engine and the behavior blocker which began life named as Mamutu. bdcore.dll is still 11.0.1.12 (I don't know the version of the latest avxdisk.dll, if different) while some Emsisoft versions will most likely have been updated since this screenie. There's another little known configuration set accessed from the tray icon menu and not the GUI. Every yoot oob "tester" I've seen fails to find it, how unusual . Some interesting settings are off by default. This is a really powerful anti-whatever solution. IMHO (read: opinion) I think BD's Active Threat Control (avccore engine) beats modern-Mamutu in the behavior blocker arena. But in combo with an anti-exploit and/or anti-ransomware, one can't go wrong with Ashampoo.
I didn't take me long to uninstall this as it was causing noticable slowdowns, even though it appeared very light at first. I think I may have had the same issue with the 2015 version as well. However, I'm sure that if I had a faster computer it would be a very good choice of antivirus. I like that it prompts you for what action to take whenever a threat is found, and that one of the options is to whitelist the detcted file. Also, the whitelist option is there whevener a malicious url is blocked, which is nice. It wants to block too many websites in my opinion, but at least it's easy to whitelist a blocked site if you do want to access it. The protactive protection looks quite decent too. I did notice that before I uninstalled it. I don't know why they didn't add an option in the regular settings menu to access it from there as well.
I just bought the their anti-virus. I became a member and used the coupon code you get when you sign up to lower the price. Is AAV's Behaviour Blocker the same as Emsisofts?