AppAholic

Version tested : 7.5.472

Website : free.grisoft.com
Download : Page

Description : One of the most popular Anti Virus software around. Fast, reliable, and with daily updates. Includes real time protection, schedule and custom scans, automatic email scanning and automatic updates. Set and forget free virus protection for users of all ability.

AVG Free is known to lots of people as the virus protection staple. Over the years, its reliability has been questioned, but it’s remained the top of the league for free virus protection, and the most popular. Anyone who’s after a free solution generally goes for this one. It has a very small resource footprint compared to other virus protection.

It’s used by all members of my family, and virtually everyone I personally know that understands what a computer virus is.

Although the free version doesn’t allow you to set up different scan schedules, it does allow you to set a daily scan and update schedule, which is still limited to set times. For the average home user though, this shouldn’t be an issue.

As per normal, it has the option to scan in the right click context menu. One word of advice there… if you have the trial of AVG AntiSpyware, then uninstall that first ( as I have finally done today) as so many times I have clicked on that rather than virus scan, which consequently hogged the system.

I don’t have much to say with regards to the email scanning, as I personally use internet mail, but I have been informed that it works well, and also attaches its own tag to the bottom of outgoing messages, marking it clean and virus free.

Be aware though, that you can’t ever really rely on one app alone for the security of an entire computer. Personally, I use AVG along with a well configured version of Spyware Terminator and Comodo Firewall. I will be reviewing both shortly, so stay tuned!