Speedup and clean-up tools might not be for everyone (not present in Essentials version) Bitdefender or Avira engines not enabled by default.

Avira Antivirus (2. Review & Rating. Is it just me, or do too many antivirus product names start with the letters A and V? If any company can stake a claim to those two letters, it's Avira, founded in way back in 1. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, the free Avira Antivirus is immensely popular. It gets excellent lab scores, and it brings along a team of related Avira products.

AVG Technologies (NYSE:AVG) is a global leader in security software, protecting more than 110 million consumers and small business computer users. IDM Crack 2016 Registered Full Version Latest Free Download. IDM Crack 2016 Latest Activated Full Version Free Download here at softwarezee.com.

Given that it's free, I can overlook the fact that both its on- demand scan and real- time protection proved sluggish in testing. The app's main window is largely white, with a white- on- slate menu at left and couple of panels that offer status information and access to features. From PC Protection, you can launch a scan or an update, toggle real- time protection, or drill down for detailed configuration settings. The Internet Protection panel is a bit weak, by comparison. Web Protection, Mail Protection, and Game Mode are grayed out and disabled, because they're not available in the free edition.

And the firewall item just helps you configure Windows firewall. An Antivirus With a Posse. Many security products flip through a series of informational slides during installation, extolling the virtues of the product itself or advertising companion products. Avira takes the concept a step further. Each of its informational images both describes a companion product and offers to install that product. I'll report on the posse of companion products after covering the core antivirus features.

Many Scan Choices. Clicking the Scan System button in the PC Protection panel launches a full system scan. The scan window itself retains the oddball window caption . I guess George Lucas doesn't mind. A full scan of my standard clean test system took two and a quarter hours, the longest time for any current product, about three times the current average scan time. That's slow. Some products speed subsequent scans by skipping files that have already been validated. For example, a repeat scan with AVG Anti.

Virus Free finished in just one minute. Not Avira; a second scan took just as long. Don't be fooled by the progress bar, as it runs to 1.

Most antivirus products offer a full system scan and a quick scan that focuses on active malware and commonly infected locations. Many add a custom scan that lets you choose where and how the scanner should operate. Clicking System Scanner in Avira's left- hand menu brings up a dizzying array of scanning choices. Quick scan and full scan are present in the list, naturally. Other choices include scanning all local drives, examining just local hard disks, checking for active malware, and scanning the Documents folder. Clearly these are meant for the unusually tech- savvy consumer. Most folks will do fine with the basic quick or full scan.

Very Good Lab Results. In most cases, antivirus companies must pay to be included in testing by the independent labs. A few of the labs actively help them achieve certification—if the product fails, the vendor gets a punch list of things that need fixing. ICSA Labs and West Coast Labs offer this type of certification, but Avira doesn't participate with either.

More interesting to me are the tests that put a group of products through the exact same evaluation and report how well they did. With those labs, Avira did quite well. Its score of 8. 5. Virus Bulletin's RAP (Reactive and Proactive) test is about halfway between the current average and the current maximum. When the experts at AV- Comparatives determine that a product does everything it should, they certify it at the Standard level. A product that goes beyond the minimum can earn Advanced certification, or even Advanced+. Avira participates in four of the five tests that I follow from this lab, and it took Advanced+ in all four.

By contrast, Quick Heal Anti. Virus Pro 1. 7 took two Advanced+ certifications and one Advanced and one Standard in those same four tests. Avira got 5. 5 points in the first two categories and 6 points in the third, for a total of 1. Note, though, that Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2. Kaspersky Anti- Virus, and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security all earned a perfect 1.

Earlier this year I added a pair of tests from London- based MRG- Effitas to the mix. One focuses on financial malware, while the other attempts to cover the whole range of malware types. Avira failed the financial test, but then, 7. Nearly as many failed the whole- range test, but Avira managed to pass at Level 2, like Avast, Norton, and Trend Micro. Only Kaspersky Anti- Virus earned Level 1 certification. Given that there's no reported difference between an epic fail and missed- it- by- that- much, I give less weight to this test in calculating my aggregate score.

Avira's aggregate score, 9. How Do I Activate My New Iphone 6 Sprint. Bitdefender. Only Norton (9. Kaspersky (1. 0 points) have done better.

All five of the labs I follow include Avast Free Antivirus 2. AVG in their testing, but their aggregate scores aren't as good as Avira's. AVG came in with 8. Avast with 8. 3. Improved Malware Protection. Analyzing a new set of samples for my hands- on malware protection test is a grueling ordeal that takes me several weeks. That being the case, I refresh the sample set just once a year, in late winter when there typically aren't many new antivirus releases.

That works fine when product releases come roughly a year apart. However, Avira's previous edition was the very first product tested using my current set of samples. Naturally the current version, which I tested in the middle of the cycle, did a little better. When I opened the folder containing my malware samples, Avira started picking them off, but slowly. Every so often it popped up a notification saying that it quarantined six files, or eight, or one. It also popped up several small floating windows captioned Luke Filewalker, with nothing in them except a progress bar, followed by a similar window with the caption . When all the progress bars reached 1.

At that point, Avira wanted to reboot the system and run a full scan. However, the point of this test is malware blocking, not scanning. Dk Oxford Illustrated Dictionary Latest Edition Of Flash. Most antivirus programs I've tested wipe out the samples they recognize in less than a minute, and they certainly don't require a reboot. Next I started launching those samples that survived.

Avira detected almost all of them at this point. For each detection, it launched one of those miniature Luke Filewalker windows, with the apparent aim of eliminating malware traces related to what it discovered. At one point during this test I found the system to be extremely sluggish. Checking with Task Manager, I discovered that the avscan. CPU resources. In a few cases, the antivirus popped up a window informing me that for full remediation I should run a scan using the Avira Rescue Disk.

I dutifully downloaded the ISO file and booted the system from it, thereby launching Avira's Ubuntu- based scanner. A full scan with the Rescue Disk took more than 9. To check how successfully the antivirus blocked malware installation, I run a tool that checks for the file and Registry traces associated with each sample, as well as for active malware processes. Each time the app asked for a Rescue Disk scan, I checked for traces both before and after the scan, but found next to no difference.

Avira failed to prevent installation of one or more executable files for most of the samples that it detected after launch. Like Norton, Trend Micro, Emsisoft Anti- Malware 1. K7 Antivirus Plus 1. Avira detected 9.

Norton and Trend Micro completely blocked every detected sample, earning 9. Avira could have had 9. Avast detected 1. For this test, I use a feed of the very latest malware- hosting URLs supplied by MRG- Effitas.

The purpose- built program I use for this test normally launches the URLs in Internet Explorer, but I had to modify it for Avira, as the Browser Safety feature in this program still only supports Chrome and Firefox.