AVG Internet Security 8.0
An old favourite gets a new look.
Now in version 8.0, AVG’s latest release appears to have taken a page or three form from Vista. A redesigned interface sports high-resolution icons and a more colorful palette, and even the system tray icon feels borrowed from Microsoft’s newest OS;turn off one of the security modules and the icon turns red, alerting you to impending doom, even if you’ve only disabled the spam filter. That’s just wacky. Thankfully, you can turn off the ominous notifications.
No other AV application we tested consumed more RAM, our perfomance benchmarks took the biggest hit with AVG installed.During a system scan( which, while not the slowest, dragged along at the tail end of all the suites), CPU utilization averaged 25 percent with sporadic spikes reaching as high as 84 percent. We didn’t know if AVG was scanning of having a seizure.
AVG provides one of the more feature –rich packages of the bunch. In addition to the new scanning engine, you’ll find spam and spyware protection, a firewall, safeguards against drive-by downloads, immunity against IM-bound attacks ( ICQ and MSN only), a customizable scheduler, and a rootkit scanner. Trying it all together is a back end brimming with options to satiate even the most demanding security connoisseur.
We especially like the concept behind AVG’s web protection, we just wish it worked better. The Active-Surf-Shield component scans visited web pages for malicious code and the Search Shield checks Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results for active threats, but enabling them slows down web surfing. And at the time of this writing, Search Shield is not working with Firefox 3.0.
AVG’s detection rate dips below that of the best-performing AV apps during Virus Bulletin’s extensive testing but still earned a VB100 award, meaning it caught all of VB’s in-the-wild viruses with no false positives. AVG also excelled in our tests. Just make sure you have a modern system to run it on.
Grisoft AVG Internet Security – 2 Year Subscription
