Very nice free antivirus :: AVG

[techAdmin]

On the recommendation of some forum members, vkaryl especially, I decided to give AVG a try. You can download it at major geeks, that website tends to download faster than the actual AVG site.

I've done some test installs, here are the things I've liked:

• The updates are very small. This is really nice for dialup users especially.
  
• The program has very good configuration options, although the configuration layout may not be quite what you are used to, but it works.
  
• So far, I haven't seen any problems with AVG on a computer.
  

I am not currently running it myself, I'm using an even lighter weight one, Antivir, which after testing it for a few months I don't think I would recommend for most users, although it's an excellent tool to use to clean out severely infected Windows installations, since those usually require multiple products to do the cleanup procedure.

Did I mention that AVG is free? And doesn't clutter up your system the way Norton or McAfee does? I have grown to really dislike Norton Antivirus, it's just a very poorly written, bloated, resource hog of a product. Nothing matches that moment when you've done a fresh Windows install, the machine runs very fast, everything feels peppy. Then you install Norton. That's the end of that, slows down, never recovers really.

AVG is a well written product, it seems to do the job at least as well as for example Norton, and doesn't cost anything. I don't think it's flawless, but I also don't think the major players like Norton do that good of a job anymore. This opinion came from working doing a networking job where a major component of my work was cleaning off trojans and viruses from network machines, running McAfee AV, and infected by often more than 20 serious backdoors and trojans. The machines also had been running in restricted permission user mode. In other words, the commercial AV software acted primarily as a placebo.

[vkaryl]

I think that anyone wanting to migrate away from norton or mcafee would be well advised to look at both AVG and Antivir. I personally didn't like Antivir, but others' mileage may vary. AVG has been working great for me for over a year, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" is my mantra....