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Shivi · Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:42 pm

Hey all,

My Zone Alarm Internet Suite subscripstion runs out in a couple of days. And the new subscription is a bit steep at USD 70.
So am thinking of defecting to a free anti-virus program and firewall.

Got the firewall down as Zone Alarm 6; but am confused over the free anti virus prog. Got to choose between Avast! and AVG.

Anyone have any experience with them? any preferences?

Thanx

ps. am also running Spybot, Adaware, Spywareblaster and M$ Antispyware

dragmor · Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:47 pm

I'm running AVG, it works, it updates, etc, no complaints.

Shivi · Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:49 pm

how is it on resources?

LicketySplit · Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:49 pm

I like the AVG 7.0 free version..they have fixed the updates so they download regularly now..works well for me.

Shivi · Tue Aug 09, 2005 7:52 pm

that's 2 for 2 ... looks like I'm headed AVG's way

thanx

bhtooefr · Tue Aug 09, 2005 8:19 pm

Props to Avast here...

Avast is a touch high on the resources, but it's better on features than AVG...

Shivi · Wed Aug 10, 2005 8:53 am

what kind of features does avast have that AVG doesn't?

steelcity_ballin · Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:08 am

Been using AVG for about 2 years give or take, not a problem here. Haven't had a single virii issue at all. No bloat, clean looking, unobtrusive, does its job, updates itself.

dextrous · Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:13 am

I'd normally say AVG, but when I went from avast back to avg I haven't been able to get avg to grab my email right. For some reason it hits pop.east.cox.net even though I have pop.central.cox.net entered in thunderbird.

Bascially, both are good and free... AVG is a little more lightweight but also a little less feature rich.

bhtooefr · Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:24 am

Avast has more on-access scanners. Also, I see no sign that AVG has XP64 support, whereas Avast does.

I don't know if this stuff applies for AVG 7, but it did for 6 - autoscans were once a day at a specified time, no other configs allowed, and setting up custom scans wasn't easy, IIRC.

On Avast, the command line scanner can be shoved into scheduled tasks (the free version doesn't make autoscanning easy, but the command line scanner's still there...) Custom scans are pretty easy, too.

Shivi · Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:57 am

so hard to decide, may have to leave the decision up to Ye Ole Coin Toss.
Any ideas on which should be heads? :wink:

Gandhi · Wed Aug 10, 2005 10:00 am

I used to use Avast. I have now switched to AVG. I had originally gone to Avast because AVG (free version) lacked a lot of features that Avast Free had. But the latest AVG Free 7.X version has a lot of the features I need (scheduling, downloads, etc).

Main reason I switched to AVG - Avast is too much of a resource hog. It would check each and every little action I would perform on the computer - opening My Documents, Office files (word, excel, etc), email scanning was way too slow for my taste. So I switched to AVG.

The biggest place you could tell Avast was much slower was in email scanning. Opening, deleting, moving emails in Thunderbird - particularly email marked as junk that I simply deleted without reading - took forever - almost 5 seconds. It was a pain. AVG is much faster.

Scanning my whole HDD (about 50 gigs of data) took about 2 hours in a thorough scan in Avast. AVG takes about half that time.

Shivi · Wed Aug 10, 2005 10:03 am

I have decided.
AVG is the light, the way!

PS. I love these forums. Love live Tech-Report!

LicketySplit · Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:06 am

It runs well with ZoneAlarm as well :wink:

Hawkwing74 · Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:22 am

I used AVG on my parent's comp and I was happy with it.

Wed Aug 10, 2005 10:55 pm

Another satisfied AVG user here. Dumped NAV for AVG about a year ago, and haven't looked back.

UberGerbil · Thu Aug 11, 2005 9:49 am

AVG is much less resource-intensive than Avast
Avast is available for 64bit
Both are much better (and less resource-intensive) than NAV

I had a friend with an up-to-date AVG installation get infected. It may have been a day-zero exploit, or something AVG doesn't check for (Avast seems to make more effort to look for exploits on web pages). But I only have that one data point, and I don't hear a lot about other people seeing holes in AVG.

anand · Thu Aug 11, 2005 11:48 am

I've had AVG installed for around 6 months now and no complaints or problems. I tried AVAST on another partition when I tried out XP64 and seems to a little friendlier interface but that's not a big deal for me as I consider antivirus programs to be something I load up once and never have to look at again, so the somewhat clunky interface of AVG doesn't bother me. I'll take AVG's slightly lower resource utilization instead.

NeRve · Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:08 pm

One thing though, AVAST is free, while AVG is not!

anand · Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:18 pm

You can still get AVG for free:

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

I think there's been some confusion because a while back AVG announced they were cancelling AVG Free 6.x. Which they did... because AVG Free 7.x was around the corner

They probably could have worded that press release a little better since alot of people were worried.

Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:54 pm

Apart from that confusing press release, where did you read the "not free" thing from?

Someone is feeding misinformation...

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