I was reading the article on comparing the free avira and avg, and below was the most interesting thing I’ve reading in the whole article
Unlike Avira, AVG Free comes packed with a bit of adware that may reflect in your search results. The modification consists in setting Yahoo! as the default search provider for both the browser search bar, as well as address bar under Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. On a different note, the application can also pin a toolbar of its own in the web browser, designed to verify every link you access.
I bet the average user didn't know that, I sure as hell didn;t
BTW, The rest of the article can be found here :-TU
Thanks for the reference and interesting readings indeed
... Both sides come with their ups and downs...
Sure, and you are right - many users don’t know … and they don’t now many other things …
Both AVs a basically fairly good.
What I do like re: Avira - it has default “Notify only” settings regarding the detections
The later we discussed many times already and especially concerning recent big failures / disasters by Avast / BitDefender/ McAfee, where users left those options as quarantine/remove as default.
As for AVG - what users have to know - all additional “services” mentioned, including Yahoo; LinkScanner; etc. - they have always perform Custom Installation and disable those - that’s basically it
Sure, all AV users must disable real-time e-mail scanning as well using any given AV irrespectively, but I hope that members of this society know that already.
Always go via Custom re-install when installing re-installing AVG and you are fine
Avira works flawlessly on win 7 Home Premium x64 now with Comodo Firewall v3.14, … but
there is one thing - that some may’ve forgot - Avira still have a “lil” bug
On some systems - the Guard and the respective service can be shut down without any warning. The only indication you may find (“few days later” :o) is that the red umbrella is not opened (SysTray). The bug still exists on some configuration of Win 2000 relict and some XP systems.
Other that that Avira is a definite winner in the detection game compare to AVG and always has a second place after Emsisoft - the best of the best regarding the detection rate for many years
So there is no no big deal about the Yahoo Toolbar - I am long term user of AVG on many systems - not having Yahoo Toolbar or any additional frills including MS Office “protection”
Now I have more than 7-9 months experience with Avira on win 7 x64 (actually in conjunction with public Beta 5 of Emsisoft Anti-Malware)
Nothing can get trough that including Comodo v3.14 Firewall & Defense+ (Proactive Mode) plus Emsisoft’s IDS Behavioral Blocker and some essential add-ons for Firefox
I believe that one of the staff members even admitted AVG has gone down hill. MOST other software now have new type of protection out now
examples:
Behavior shield of some sort, sandbox, hips, you get the idea. AVG has none of that. Their newest addition was the link scanner a while ago and they bought that. I’m guessing some of the people their are close to retiring and are just going to relax and coast on by
The point was you can have AVG or any other AV or whatever as a main AV or on-demand one scanner without any additional surrounding … how can I put that diplomatically …hmmm… ■■■■ – yes that’s the word
… and then, even if some people are retiring – that is normal process
and Comodo’s AV has to eat a lot of dust till it reaches the level of Emsisoft or Avira
My opinion is – most likely that will never happen,
… but, as we discussed that many, many times - those few percents ups & downs according to any test “today”(!!! important) - really doesn’t mean a thing in a hundred years.
Any AV is not an answer anyway – the war is lost, but just going on and will go on for a long time to come.
That is the normal human behaviour.
We need strong Behavioural Blocker (BB) rather than AV
and sure - strong BB for human behavior would be appreciated as wall … but that one will never be developed ;D
Bit off topic… But google chrome does the same sort of thing, a lot. You might look up Pc games one day, the next day when your browsing you’ll see add banners everywhere advertising games…
I personally feel that Avast! is the best free AV available. It didn’t score quite as high as Avira in the latest detection tests but it also had far fewer FP’s than Avira did. The detection tests are to be taken with a grain of salt anyway because you might get totally different rankings a day, or even a few hours, later due to signature database updates. I would be far more concerned with the false positive rates which are far too high in Avira. AVG used to be the best but has steadily been getting bloated and declining in effectiveness the last few years.
I would also like to know the meaning of
Sure, all AV users must disable real-time e-mail scanning as well using any given AV irrespectively, but I hope that members of this society know that already.
. I don’t think disabling email scanning is a must. It might be okay to do seeing how the files would get scanned on access anyway and given that most email providers scan everything that goes through their servers, but I don’t see it as something you absolutely have to do. I leave the mail shield on in Avast!, even though I probably don’t have to, because it doesn’t hurt anything and maybe, just maybe, a different set of signatures might detect something that gets through another set. I feel this is better since I have chosen not to use any forms of HIPS or Sandboxing.
