AntiVir vs Avast

If you are REALLY sorry, why not buy me a new computer?

Just kidding. Actually, my grandchildren are having a new computer built for me, which I shall get as a birthday present. I'm not supposed to know about that, but the builder (a personal friend) inadvertently let the information slip.

 

Oh Bellgamin, how nice. I am real excited for you please share with us what you get. You are using older machines I think aren't you? I am looking forward to new built system after Longhorn comes out for a little while.

Grandchildren that would make it special. I have children. Not old enough for grandlittle ones yet.

 

No need to use Babelfish, just go to the middle right of their web page and click on the "Other Languages" and the English version will come up.

 

Right, but we only have 4 english articles there and none of the "newer" tests are available in english.

regards, Joerg

 

Please, if anyone is interested, check this related thread I just opened here at "Wilders Security" forums: My thoughts about AntiVir vs. other anti-virus programs


stalker

 

Huge updates are not an issue anymore. A recent version fixed that problem (for the most part).

Phil

 

Same experience here on Win98SE. Avast must not play well with Win9x. I tried Avast for less than an hour. After installation it immediately locked up my PC and forced me to kill the power. After rebooting it was still acting screwy, so I immediately uninstalled it. I might try it again after I install Windows 2000 Pro.

Phil

 

I have installed Avast in three Win98 machines and they run fine till today, for anyone having issues with 98 stability, I thoroughly recommend the Unofficial 98 service pack from http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html

Not only does this patch renew 98's life but it also makes it more compatible with some of the newer hardware plus this patch adds many new stuff as well.

 

I have also run Avast on a Win98 machine here for years with zero problems. Doesn't slow anything down either. Has always worked fine for me on both Win98 and Win2k.

 

Yep, but still lacks some nice features that avast already have...

AntiVir is very good for an older PC or for an AV backup...

 

Antivir i definitly good for low spec machines , and i would say detection is easily on a par with avast.It does not have the bells and whistles that avast has though , and i guess its down to the user whether these are important.The antivir free lacks an email scanner , but detects upon writing to disk anyway.I now have the premium but dont really feel any safer for its inclusion.Avast (as well as mail scanner)has modules for p2p ,and chat programmes like messenger.But personally i didnt really feel any safer when i used avast and the activated modules ,because i knew that its resident shield would get the nasties anyway.Where i feel antivir free lacks, compared to avast, is not the bells and whistles, but in things like on demand scanning options ,ease of updating (at present) and user support which is second to none in avasts favour.Where antivir surpasses avast though is in its low impact on a system.If i could compare these two avs to two well known anitrojans (figurativly of course ), i would say antivir is like the boclean family (simple ,in the background,just gets on with it) wheras avast is like tds3 suite family (lots to play with,loads of options ,extra functions).Of course i hope avast literally doesnt go the way of tds3 though
ellison

 

antivir does have a better detection rate than avast by 2% but if you take out script virus detection for avast( which the free edition dosent have) avast will rank even lower than antivir in detection rate.

 

The detection capabilities of the free and paid edition of avast are exactly the same - they use identical engines and virus databases.

 

Exactly. Pay attentuion that scripts that are executed via WSH aren't the same thing as script malware. First one is covered only by Pro edition via Script Blocker, while second are covered by all avast! editions.

 

Some of the conclusions in this old thread may have to be changed with the imminent release of AntiVir 7.

However, even with incremental updating with the new version, I would still not recommend AntiVir Classic for dial-up users. Here on my machines in the UK, Classic on dial-up typically updates at 1 kB/s while the Premium updates at 4-5kB/s, irrespective of the time of day in updating.

Further, connection to the Classic servers frequently timed out whereas the Premium servers were immediate and quick.

So, on dial-up, IMHO, AntiVir Premium is a much better choice and it is this version that should be used to compare with Avast.

 

In the case of avast, the updates will always be coming at the full speed of your Internet connection. This is because we have big redundancy built into our updating infrastructure.

Currently, we have 46 active updating servers (download0.avast.com - download45.avast.com) and each of them provides at least 100mbit steady connection to the Internet (backbone) - some of them even a gbit.

 

Wow, thats wicked sick Vlk (really)

 

A good example of an useful redundancy!

 

As a matter of fact, it's not as big redundancy as it may seem... Even though avast virus definition updates are typically small in size, they can sometimes grow up to a couple of hundred of KB's...


And you probably don't know how many users we've got

 

These update servers probably include program updates aswell which aren't thats small (although they are among the smalles in AV category ).

 

Yeah, but program updates are distributed in time (over 7 days) and so do not pose any problem at all...

New program downloads are worse, at least bandwidth-wise...


But we have a lot of bandwidth reduncancy as well (tens of terabytes)

 

@vlk
How can Awill effort all this server capicity? The home users only cost you money, and are there enough pro users to fill the costs? It's indeed a true thing that I never had/saw/heard about problems with avast!'s update servers

 

Cost of the updating infrastructure is nothing compared to the cost of technical support (we provide support even for users of the free edition).

But yeah, it still pays off.

 

@vlk
Thanks for the fast reply. Sometimes I almost can't believe you still offer the free home edition. I really hope it'll pay off in the future as well!

Maybe there will be bigger differences in functionality between the home and pro when avast! 5 comes out? I mean, the difference now is almost nothing, the advanced interface (wich most pro users don't even use), and the scrip scanner (from what I remember igor said, it could even been better removed).

Maybe avast! will go the same way as AntiVir, so only the base scanner (the standard shield and on-demand scanning) for free, and the additional shields in the pro version? We'll see

 

I don't think so. We're pretty happy with the current situation.

Our philosophy is a bit different than AntiVir's. Avast Home Edition is our primary marketing tool, and as such, we want to make it as good as possible. It must be a full-blown product and provide maximum protection to the user - that's generally the only way to make the user happy.

You're right that we're not selling many single-user licenses of avast! Professional (as an upgrade of avast! Home) - but we are doing very well in the small business market as well as in the case of larger customers/networks (things are getting much better recently).