Comparing AVG 8.0 , PC Tool 4, Avast 4.8 and Avira AntiVir - Free Editions

ive been testing this Free version of anti virus software from different company.

AVG 8.0 - AVG Technologies
Avast 4.8 - Alwil Software
AntiVir 8.1 - Avira
PC Tool 4.0 - PC Tools

Comparing each products takes a lot of time and a lot of machine, i need to use 4 different pc in the office just to test this anti virus products.
You can only give a review on individual products if you have used this for at least 2 weeks (includes testing) which i did.

AVG 8.0 Free Edition

What's nice about AVG is the detection rates, and real time protection, plus the email scanner included in the package together with anti virus and anti spyware. AVG detects every sample i threw at it. but the main problem with AVG is it's a resource hog, it takes a lot of ram and cpu usage usually when scanning, opening programs or surfing the web. But i assure you with AVG you are safe.

RAM usage - 40-55MB for resident shield. too much for a pc with only 256mb of ram.
I recommend avg for pc with higher specs.

Avast 4.8 home Edition

This is a complete protection Anti Virus, Anti Spyware, Anti Rootkit, includes email scanner, Web Shield and network shield which acts as a lightweight firewall. detection is fair, it failed to detect a sample of mine which is in archive. which Avira and AVG detects.

It also has a boot scanning capabilities which is very nice.

Ram and cpu usage is light to fair.
20-30MB for resident scanner (real time protection)

some problems i encountered with Avast is, it has a lot of false positive and with this free version you need to baby sit the product when doing on demand scanning. plus it can't delete infection while it is running in your system.
All in all this is still the most complete free version product and much lighter than AVG

AntiVir 8.1 Personal Free Edition

Detection rate is as good as AVG but 5X lighter than AVG. All sample i threw at it were caught. but it missed spywares which the product doesn't include
it only has Anti Virus, Anti Rootkit and Anti Phising. No email scanner so if your using Web based mail this is for you.

RAM and CPU usage very light, but when scanning on demand the CPU takes up to 50MB with 70% CPU usage. Fast Scanning. But the advertisment is very annoying each time you update, plus the free version's update is somehow very long to complete.

Avira Guard - 10-20MB only

If your not regularly surfing the web and you use web based emails and you have low specs on your pc this product is for you.

PC Tools Antivirus 4.0

The lighest of all products you dont even feel it's their protecting you, it has Antivirus, email scanner, Intelli-guard for real time protection, Auto update and schedule scanning. fair detections, it cleaned and detected my brontoks and some variants of it.

The only problem here is it doesn't have antispyware and other things. its pure anti virus. plus it destroyed my Spyware Terminator. which is a legitimate software. PC Tools detected it as a mutant virus or something like that.

CPU and RAM - lightest of all, you can even work with your computer while doing scans.

Intelli-Guard - 4-10mb only

If your not an expert with anti virus program then this is for you, its just install and forget.

I hope you enjoy my reviews.

thanks

 

Nice reviews, and I agree for the most part with your assessments. I think your reported RAM usage of Avast is a little light though. As soon as you open a web browser if find RAM usage balloons to about 45-60 meg. Their web scanner eats a lot of memory.

 

Who really cares about RAM usage really? I mean you get superb RAM for 75 eur. And i'm talking 2x2GB low latency 800MHz DDR2 with heat spreader. You can get anything generic for 50 eur probably. Besides, RAM is there to be used, not to idle for itself...

 

Well yeah, this is Windows-specific obsession caused by retarded memory management. You can have 100% physical RAM used under Linux and still have a responsive non-swapping system. That's virtually impossible under Windows; it's swapping for no reason, just to keep some RAM free.

 

Backward compatibility... some programs complain about lack of free memory even though it's just cached for Vista and could be easily freed anytime program needed it. But since old programs aren't Vista aware or even written poorly they just fail miserably.

 

This has nothing to do w/ backwards compatibility. Windows memory management has always sucked and it still sucks. I don't recall any program complaining about "lack of free memory", all I get is the OS swapping and swapping and swapping for virtually no reason. No new application run or anything else, it just decides to swap to "free" some memory (probably so that the user can take a photo with his free memory). Seconds later, it shows that the "freed" part of RAM was in fact being used by the application and it again reads the data from the swap file which is about 1000x slower than leaving the damned thing in RAM while it's being used and while nothing requests additional RAM. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

 

Obviously you never used Vista for real...

 

ROTFLMAO! An operating system that in itself requires at least 2GiB of RAM to be reasonably responsive is indeed a wonderful example of top-notch memory management quality...

 

my impression of all the 'A' avs is they aren't as reliable as the PCTools av

having used them all for lengthy periods each one has been knocked out by
various 'viruses' and couldn't be reloaded whereas pct hasn't so far had that
problem, it appears to be very good at blocking before the virus activates

re SpywareTerminator and others: when i've installed pct it won't load if
hijackthis is installed, so guess it's best to uninstall all other 'av' programs
then install pct first and re-install other programs afterwards, hjt runs fine
after doing so

 

Sorry, but over the last 4 weeks I've installed and removed Mandriva 2008.1, Ubuntu, OpenSusu 11, PCLinux2007. I prefer Vista.

 

Mmm, yeah you never used it...

 

When properly configured with the right hardware and a good AV; Vista is actually faster than XP. As a Vista user, I can vouch for that.....

 

Yes, thank you hex, that was most interesting! I use NOD32 (over four years now) on this desktop, however, I've been using free on the notebook. Used Avast for about six months and just recently switched to Avira. I use a little RAM monitor (MemInfo) in the notification area and with 2GIG and Vista Home Premium rarely used even 50% while using Avast so that doesn't really seem to be an issue. Might try PCTools for a while too! Thank you again!