Avast

I think it would be a good idea a serius evaluation of Avast Home Edition, pointing out qualities and faults. This because the program is probably the best freeware antivirus and can be used by many people. Maybe some of its faults might be overcome using other programs as BitDefender free, Escan free toolkit, a2 free.
I used Avast for some months but I'm not a tester. My personal considerations are:
- good email scanner;
- good detection of ITW viruses;
- quite good detection of viruses in general;
- faults in detection of polymorphic and in heuristic detection;
- too many false positives.
What do you think about?

 

I don't use free av's for my primary scanner but if I did I would probably use Avast .

 

I just downloaded it and ran it which returned me with 24 postives. I have NAV with all defs up to date. Could be the 24 be all false postives? When I decided to do research on the "found virus" the only defs for it are found on avast homepage, nowhere else. This certainly makes me suspicious.

 

frozenbrains, what are the names of the viruses reported, and the corresponding file names?

If you have a suspicion that something is wrong, you can get better help about avast on our support forum http://forum.avast.com or by submitting the files to our virus lab virus@avast.com .

Thanks
Vlk