Avast Premier 2015
Avast is one of the most popular IS applications available. Unlike AVG, which tries to persuade you to upgrade to a subscription version at any opportunity, Avast is proud of the fact that it’s basic version is free. Here, we’re looking at the Premier version, though, which costs £60 for a one-year, three-PC licence.
For this, you get the core functions of AV, anti-spam, antimalware, two-way firewall and online banking security. There isn’t a backup module, though a Dropbox app loads and installs with its standard 2GB of free online storage.
Avast is good at presenting security stats in non-technical terms. It’s Home Network Security scan comes back and warns of any security weaknesses. We were surprised to find it was concerned about our ‘weak’ network password, though, which contains lower and upper case letters, numbers and punctuation characters. Hard to see how we could make it stronger.
You can also clean up your browser, by checking for malware add-ons and removing them automatically. Under test, Avast warned that the Webroot toolbar was a dubious add-on, though, which might say more about professional rivalry than the danger of the Webroot software.
The application checks the versions of the programs installed on your system and keeps them up to date. Avast’s SafeZone isolates your browser for when you’re banking online and Grimefighter, which is linked in under ‘Scan for performance issues’, though you’ll need to pay an extra £20 to fix what it finds.
Avast Premier 2015 completed our 50GB AV scan surprisingly quickly, in eight minutes 35 seconds, but only looked at 17,906 files. This gives a scan rate of 34.8 files/s, considerably slower than the 85.7 files/s average of all the IS suites we’ve tested. Rerunning the test, the software looked at the same number of files, but did it in five minutes 31 seconds, somehow managing a 55 percent increase in speed.
In our copy test, copying a 1GB file took 16 seconds longer with a scan running than without, a 38 percent increase, which is a good deal better than average, but not good compared with the top players. This reflects AV-Test’s results, where the comparison site gave it 3.5/6 in the Performance section of its tests. It took a second longer than the average in the organisation’s group test.
It did better in the Protection category, scoring 5/6 overall. This equates to an average of 99 percent accuracy in spotting widespread and prevalent malware, the group average, and unusually, slightly better at 99.5 percent against zeroday attacks. These figures were from the free version of the software, but Avast uses the same AV engine throughout its product range.
In the third section, Usability, the software scored a full 6/6 with no false blockages when visiting websites and only two false detections during scanning of 425,612 files, against a group average of nine. Adding the scores for these three categories gives Avast its overall score of 15.5/18, which is a commendable result, though short of the market leaders.
Verdict
Avast is an excellent free AV offering. This commercial product is not such good value, lacking some of the features we’ve come to expect of premium suites. Backup and PC tune-up are missing or require an extra purchase.