AVG Anti. Virus Free (2. Review & Rating. When hundreds of millions of people worldwide run your free antivirus program, you must be doing something right. The latest edition of AVG Anti.
Virus Free earned good scores from the independent labs and in our own hands- on testing. Oh, and those rumors about AVG selling your personal data? They proved to be unfounded. AVG is an Editor's Choice for free antivirus once again. The program's dark- hued main window features five large panels representing five security areas: Computer, Web, Identity, Email, and Firewall. Each panel includes a colored circle that's proportionally colored to reflect how complete your protection is, and each circle changes from green to red if there's a problem. If you want to see completely green circles, meaning full protection, you'll have to upgrade to the non- free AVG Anti.
Virus (2. 01. 6). AVG really does want you to try the pro edition. During installation, you get a choice of proceeding to install AVG free or starting a 3. It's a bit tricky; the only way to proceed with the free edition is to back up a step and select Custom Install. And of course the ad panel across the bottom exhorts you to upgrade. Privacy Brouhaha.
AVG made the news recently with reports that its new privacy policy allowed the company to sell your browsing and search history. An article in Wired made some strong statements, among them that this policy placed AVG squarely in the category of spyware. I perused the actual privacy policy, along with privacy policies of a number of other sites, and concluded that AVG's policy is completely normal for the industry. Publishers of free antivirus software must have some way to make money, but it totally can't involve selling personal data. That would be corporate suicide. The scariest privacy policy I read belonged to Wired itself.
Norton AntiVirus, developed and distributed by Symantec Corporation, was providing malware prevention and removal during a subscription period. It used signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features included in. This article is aimed towards the group of people who still working with Symantec Corporate Edition and wants to see what is the difference compared to Symantec Endpoint Protection. SAVCE (Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition. General Requirements: You can install Kaspersky Anti-Virus 8.0 for Windows Servers Enterprise Edition on a server running either 32- or 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. For installing and operating the program on a.
Symantec Enterprise Technical Support Articles, videos and downloads that help solve technical issues related to your Symantec products.
- AVG Antivirus Protection FREE Essential free antivirus. For all your devices.
- Symantec provides security products and solutions to protect small, medium, and enterprise businesses from advanced threats, malware, and other cyber attacks.
Good Lab Results AVG participates in testing with all of the most- innovative labs that I follow, and does well. It has also appeared in all of the last 1. Virus Bulletin, and received VB1.
Of the three testing criteria used by AV- Test Institute, protection against malware is the most important. AVG defeated 1. 00 percent of the malware samples used in this test, earning 6 of 6 possible points. It also took 6 points for usability, meaning it exhibited almost no false positives. The only thing keeping it from achieving a perfect 1. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2.
AVG Anti. Virus Free (2. Lab Tests Chart. In a different performance test by AV- Comparatives, AVG rated Advanced+, the top rating. It also earned Advanced+ in the dynamic real- world protection test, and in a test specifically measuring how thoroughly products remove malware they detect. It would have managed Advanced in both static file detection tests by this lab, but false positives knocked one score down to Standard. The months- long real- world test performed by Dennis Technology Labs is labor- intensive enough that this lab only includes about 1.
Like Kaspersky Anti- Virus (2. Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security 2. AVG earned AAA certification, the best rating. While AVG doesn't have the across- the- board top scores that Bitdefender and Kaspersky boast, it's definitely up there with the best free products. See How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests. Speedy Scan. When you click the Scan now button on the main window, you get several choices.
You can manage scheduled scans, run a scan of the whole computer, scan a specific folder, or run a rootkit scan. That last one had me worried the first time I saw it. Would users have to run a rootkit scan and a full scan? Don't worry; the full scan includes rootkits.
I timed a full scan on my standard clean test system and found it took 2. That's pretty good, given that the current average is 3.
During the initial scan, AVG notes files that are known to be safe and hence don't require scanning as long as they don't change. A repeat scan with AVG completed in barely a minute.
Effective Malware Blocking. AVG put on a good show in my hands- on malware- blocking test. When I opened the folder containing my malware samples, it leapt in to the fray, knocking out one sample after another. Within a few minutes, 8. I launched the remaining samples and analyzed how well AVG detected and blocked them.
It detected 8. 9 percent of the samples and scored 8. Panda Free Antivirus (2. Kaspersky, Mc. Afee Anti. Virus Plus (2. 01. This simple hands- on test relies on the same set of samples for months, and scores for products tested using different sample sets aren't directly comparable.
For example, Webroot Secure. Anywhere Antivirus (2. AVG Anti. Virus Free (2. Malware Blocking Chart. My malicious URL blocking test, on the other hand, is always current. Using a data feed supplied by MRG- Effitas, I challenge each antivirus with the very newest malware- hosting URLs. For each URL that doesn't result in an error message, I note whether the antivirus prevented the browser from even visiting the URL, eliminated the payload during or immediately after download, or ignored the threat.
Most products block access to the malicious URL by replacing it with a warning in the browser. I didn't realize until well into the test that AVG's display for a blocked URL is almost identical to the popup for a blocked download. I can't say precisely what the breakdown between blocked URLs and blocked downloads was, but one way or another AVG protected against 7. Panda reached in this test. Given that the current average protection rate for this test is 4.
AVG's score looks pretty good. Mc. Afee and Symantec Norton Security Deluxe are tied for best score in this test, each with 9. See How We Test Malware Blocking.
Decent Phishing Protection. Phishing websites are frauds that masquerade as various kinds of secure websites, in order to steal your login credentials.
A majority of antivirus products include a module designed to steer you away from these sites. Most of them replace the offending site with a warning page. AVG uses the same popup display as does when it blocks a malware- hosting URL or a malicious download.
This does result in some odd- looking pages in the browser, as AVG steps in to specifically remove the page components that represent the phishing attack. I frequently saw pages that looked like some portion of Facebook, Wells Fargo, and other sites, but with much of the content missing. AVG Anti. Virus Free (2.
Antiphishing Chart. Norton is my touchstone for this test, because of its consistent high accuracy.
AVG's detection rate came in 2. Norton's. That's better than about two- thirds of current products. I also compare each product's detection rate to the antiphishing protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Some less- effective solutions can't even beat the built- ins.
AVG did lag Internet Explorer by 1. Chrome and substantially better than Firefox; must have been a bad antiphishing day for Firefox. See How We Test Antiphishing. Identity Protection. Contrary to what you might think, the Identity Protection component has nothing to do with identity theft, credit monitoring, and that sort of thing. Rather, it's a behavior- based detection system designed to detect malicious behavior patterns.
I didn't see it in action during my anti- malware testing, though. Behavior- based detection can be effective if it evaluates patterns of behavior, like Webroot does. Products that pop up a warning for every single possibly- suspicious activity, even actions by perfectly safe programs, aren't so useful. For a sanity check, I installed 2. PCMag utilities that are known to do things like install drivers, configure themselves to launch as startup, and so on. AVG correctly kept hands off, delivering no erroneous warnings. Bonus Features. After installing AVG Free you'll find a new item on the right- click menu titled "Permanently shred with AVG." If you select this item and confirm your choice, AVG overwrites the file before deletion, making it impossible to undelete the file.
That's handy for wiping out sensitive files beyond the possibility of forensic recovery. Smack in the middle of the product's main window you'll find a button titled Fix performance. Clicking this button launches a PC Analyzer window that checks for Registry errors, junk files, disk fragmentation, and broken shortcuts. When finished, it displays its results along with a Fix now button. Clicking Fix now doesn't actually fix anything.
Rather, it downloads a one- day free trial of AVG PC Tune. Up. The tuneup tool runs its own more- extensive scan and actually does fix the problems it found. You'll want to explore all the features of this program and use them right away, because after a day the trial ends. The tuneup utility also installs two ancillary tools.
Tuneup Undelete scans your system and identifies all deleted files whose details are still present on disk and rates the possibility of recovering the deleted files' data. If the prognosis is good, you may be able to recover deleted files. AVG Disk Space Explorer analyzes your disk usage and presents visual representations of the biggest files, the file types that occupy the most space, and more. Both of these tools go dead after the one- day trial. I noticed one oddity. After installing the tuneup utility, the secure deletion menu item name changed to AVG Shredder, and it went dead when the trial expired. Uninstalling the tuneup utility fixed that problem.
AVG Web Tuneup is a browser add- in with three important functions. First, it rates the safety of the websites you visit, with an option to get details like the server location and whether SSL security is used.
You can also click for a full site report. The Do Not Track feature, turned off by default, actively prevents ad networks, social media buttons, and Web analytics tools from tracking your browsing activity. Unlike the similar feature in Abine Blur and other products, AVG doesn't flaunt its activities by notifying you of the number of trackers blocked on each site; it just does the job. Note that not all trackers are blocked by default.