Great, you bought a new PC with Core i7 920, 3GB RAM, 1.5TB hard disk, AMD 4890 graphics….(ok stop bragging). And yet, your PC is as vulnerable to swine flu computer viruses as an ancient Pentium pro machine. OK, so you asked your friends’ recommendation of a free antivirus(AV) program to protect your computer, high chances are, your friends might introduce you AVG. AVG is a famous AV thanks to its ease of use and fast virus definition update.

Well, famous stuff is not necessarily good. I’ve used it myself and couldn’t complain much, till my PC infected with Brontok virus. The most stupid thing that this AVG does is; it alerts me of the virus but it somehow couldn’t clean it. I was completely dumbfounded, trying to update to the latest virus definition couldn’t help either. I gave up, and resort to other free antivirus. Doing some simple research and I found one – avira. Without much hesitation I uninstall AVG and install avira to my pc. Goodbye AVG!

After the installation was completed, it did a quick scan on my PC. Few minutes and I got a funny alert sound with a pop up from avira saying that Brontok virus was found on my system. There are few options for me to choose; ignore, quarantine, delete…etc. I choosed delete and the next thing is, this virus is deleted (this is what u can’t do AVG). It gave me a good impression on avira’s virus detection rate. The next best thing from avira is, its memory usage is incredibly low! There are 3 processes from avira once you booted in Windows: avgnt.exe (~2MB), sched.exe(~1MB), and avguard.exe(~8MB). The total of avira memory usage is not even half of AVG (~30MB), another plus point for this AV.

There is one complain about this free AV though, the update process is slow. This could have been its virus definition update files were big. If you can forgive about its slow update and I believe you should, avira is the free AV for you. Forget about spending your bucks to get Kaspersky, McAfee or Norton. Avira can just perform as well as them. And the best thing is, it’s free! You can download your avira here

For a list of AV comparison report, click this link, look at the report and you’ll find that avira is indeed one of the best AV out there. There are many more comparison report by searching in google and most agree with my point here. .

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