AVG Free Antivirus 2015
Free • free.avg.com
AVG hit the IT headlines recently with the clearly stated privacy policy that it would share some personal and non-personal data about the customers of its free antivirus product with third parties – read advertisers. While lots of products do this, unless you specifically opt out, there’s something particularly onerous about an Internet Security product, even a free one, taking such a liberal view of your computer privacy.
The new AVG Free includes AVG’s Zen application, which can show you the status of all your devices running the software and handle installation of the software on them. AVG Free is available for PC, Mac and Android, so this management app can be a useful tool.
The control screens are all slate grey, with good, big tiles on the home window, leading off to the main modules of the suite. AVG offers manual and scheduled AV scans, LinkScanner to check against browsing to dodgy sites, identity protection – checking for apps stealing personal details – and an email scanner looking for damaging attachments.
The firewall, data safe and spam filter are left for the commercial Pro version, though AVG does supply a PC Analyser, which looks at the state of your Registry, junk files, fragmentation and broken web shortcuts. You only get one free fix, though, before having to pay.
Performance
Whether it’s more efficient or just uses different algorithms, a scan of our 50GB file basket took less than some others, at 48 minutes, and looked at 236,058 files, with a repeat checking just 13,978 in under five minutes. This indicates a good level of file marking, so it doesn’t waste time by rechecking unchanged files. You can set the scanner to high or low speed or leave it to dynamically allocate resources, depending on other PC activity.
Running a full scan while copying a 1GB file only increased the copy time by four seconds, a 9 percent increase, which indicates a very low resource hit to the system. This doesn’t tie up with AV-Test’s Performance result, which is a more comprehensive suite of tests. They scored AVG at 4.5/6, as it matched the industry standard performance drop of 3 seconds, behind products like Avira, where we measured a much more noticeable performance drop off.
The Protection score from AV-Test also fell back half a point, with an average of 99.5 percent in both widespread and zero day threats. This is still a pretty good level of protection, of course, but a single slip up can still cause a lot of anguish.
The Usability score was a perfect 6/6, as the software gave no false warnings or blockages of legitimate software under any of the scenarios that were tested. This gives an overall score for the product of 16/18, which is a very good result. VERDICT: AVG Free continues to be one of the best free antivirus programs you can get. It offers a good selection of key protections, though you do have to be careful to install the right product, and be aware that you’re paying for it with a reduction in privacy.