Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus 8

Publisher’s description of Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus

From Avira:

Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus is a comprehensive, easy to use
antivirus program, designed to offer reliable free of charge virus
protection to home-users only. Avira offers: Extensive Malware
Recognition of viruses, Trojans, backdoor programs, worms, etc.
Automatic incremental updates of antivirus signatures, engine and
entire software. Permanent virus protection, with Virus Guard real time
monitoring. Install and configuration in just a couple of steps. Virus
protection against known and unknown threats, using an advanced
heuristic system. Scheduler where you can set the scanner to make
automatic virus scans or updates on your system. Forum and phone
support, Knowledge Base with virus descriptions available on web site.
Vista Support. Rootkit Detection and Removal. Version 8 adds an
enhanced interface, a modularized AV-search engine for improved scan
performance, an integrated failsafe security system, and SMTP support
for AntiVir MailGuard.

Editor’s review of Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus

Get all-the-time protection with AntiVir

For
a free antimalware and antivirus app that also runs in your system’s
background, AntiVir works surprisingly well. Its scans are flexible,
allowing the user to fully scan all hard drives, choose a preloaded
scan–for rootkits, for example–or customize a scan. Combining the
antimalware with the antivirus is a luxury in a free scanner. After
testing on several machines no viruses turned up, although several
malicious hidden files did rear their heads. The heuristic scan can be
turned on or off completely or partially, with three different
intensity levels.

The quarantine is extensively thorough,
too. The spreadsheet layout displays all relevant information about the
quarantined file, and gives you options to scan it again, restore,
delete, and more. The scheduler is fully customizable. Definition files
are available at Avira’s Web site if needed, and the help features are
excellent, as well, with a description box relaying mouse-over
information on each feature. Version 8.0 has introduced a faster engine
and a faster definition file update, both of which are instantly
noticeable improvements and yet still a bit slow.

Initial
concerns about the real-time Guard protection hamstringing system
performance proved groundless. Although we could shut off AntiVir and
its Guard, there was no way to remove the icon from the system tray or
stop the occasional ad placement by Avira. The Complete Scan is no
longer numbingly slow, but it will pauses midscan to let you know when
it’s found a threat. That’s good for killing nasties, but it also means
that you have to baby-sit it. AntiVir’s volume of features might take a
while to get used to, but as long as the definitions file updates keep
coming, this app’s a keeper.

DOWNLOAD NOW