The AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 Free fully integrated antivirus and antispyware scanner checks files on demand, on schedule, and on access. It also scans incoming e-mail messages for threats and can optionally scan outgoing messages as well. Some reviewers have reported—incorrectly—that e-mail scanning works only for the first 30 days. According to AVG's CEO, Karel Obluk: "With the free version, what you see from the very beginning is what you get and will be getting always. There are definitely no expiring functions." The free version updates definitions automatically once per day; more frequent automatic update checks (as often as every 15 minutes) are available in the paid version.
AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 Free Spotting Spyware I've put a whole new set of malware samples into play since I torture-tested the full AVG suite last month. My samples contain a wide variety of malicious programs, including adware, spyware, Trojans, rootkits, polymorphic threats, worms, and rogue antispyware programs. I installed AVG Free on infested virtual machines and challenged it to clean them up.
Something about the malware on the very last system I tested just wouldn't let AVG's installation finish. AVG would get almost to the end and then report an error, asking that I reboot and try again. I did, several times, and even tried to install the program in Safe mode (which, it turns out, is not supported). Nothing I did could make it work.
The antivirus technology is the same as that in the full AVG Security Suite 8. In fact, the antivirus is the strongest part of the suite, which didn't rate well overall. It got the VB100% award in Virus Bulletin's last three tests, and ICSA Labs certifies it for virus detection. West Coast Labs goes further, giving it checkmark certification for both virus detection and cleaning, plus another checkmark for Trojan horse detection. European lab AV-Comparatives bestowed its top rating for on-demand virus removal but didn't rate the product as high on tests of behavior-based detection. AV-Test of Germany rated the utility very good at spyware detection, good at virus detection, and merely satisfactory at cleaning up what it detected.
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