Avast is a decent anti-virus,little weak on proactive detection,little high on RAM,
but overall pretty good.
For years one of the things AVAST boasted the most about,was providing a free full featured program,
that differed from the paid on mostly in the matter of “Bells&Whistles”,such as scheduled scans,etc.
The always said the protection of the Home(free) version was on a par with the Pro(pay)version.
recently users of the home version have been treated to the follow message that pops onto
the resident protection dialog box:
Enhance Your Protection!
the free Avast Home edition provides limited protection capabilities.
Upgrade to AVAST Professional edition for maximum protection.
Little different spin.
from dang near equal to “limited” ie,“Also ran” “What?that ole thing?” “Well if you really want to bury Grand-Pap in that…”
This no doubt heralds a shift toward sidelining the free edition,and an aggressive push to sell the Pro.
(to cover the cost of the new AVAST5 suite,major components of which are going to be paid only.
The firewall for example.)
Look for an increase in anti-Comodo sentiment there,as the fear of a real full featured free suite begins to fester.
first post. it will be necessary to be logged into the forum to see the pop-up.
Petit:
I know there is a firewall planed.But it is to be be pay ware only.
There is talk of hueristics,but also the old soft shoe about “What is Hueristics’s?”
The Avast forum is very open,but the Alwil Team is pretty tight lipped.
They seem to count on the forum to put a human face on the operation.
I haven’t seen any pop-ups like that with Avast!. I’m currently using Avast! 4.8.1335, too. The only time I’ve ever seen Avast! show a pop-up “advertisement” like window is to remind users that they need to register the free version again (but it also tries to get them to switch to the paid version, as far as I can remember).
I first started out using AVG, many years ago… and then switched to Avast!. Recently, I tried NOD32 Antivirus v3, after buying it… and it would always freeze up programs, especially while opening them or downloading them. So, I quickly switched back to Avast!. After NOD32 v4 was offered as a free upgrade to people who bought v3, I tried it again… and still had the same problem.
So, here I am, using Avast! again. In my opinion, it’s a really nice free antivirus program, and I still fail to understand why websites such as Remove-malware.com rate it so low. No AV is perfect, but Avast! has always kept me safe. I don’t blame Alwil for trying to push the paid version a little bit… but the free version is so nice that there isn’t much of a reason for anyone to go for the paid version :P.
After looking again…
I do see the “banner” in the on-access protection control area… at the bottom.
It kinda sucks that it is there, and personally it will never encourage me to buy the professional edition (I’m a 17 year old without a job… my money is spent on more important stuff) … but at least it isn’t obtrusive.
You are very right. The term “banner” is much better than pop-up in this case,as it seems only to be on the
dialog box to set resident shield protection.
I do not thank anything has been done to REDUCE the protection level on the Home Version,
i was simply pointing out a dichotomy between the ancient party line of “Equal Protection in the Home version,
greater Convenience in the Pro.”
We are now talking “limited protection” in Alwils words,for the free.
There was a test Mat did,where some sort of Malware slipped past the WebShield and made it on to the disk.
In any event I draw quite a distinction between Mat,and his YouTube test’s,and the crowd on his forum.
A few months I made a honest test:
An infected PC from a client (mostly flash stick viruses: they’re located in the root directory of every partition and also have the (in)famous ‘autorun.inf’ file), was checked with Avast! Home & Comodo Antivirus, both fully updated, Avast! won.
Too bad ‘COMODO Memory Firewall’ is embedded in COMODO Antivirus engine.
Avast! is big in RAM, about 100MB but I have killed viruses that NOD32 v3.x couldn’t take off, both fully updated, and this situation tends to be permanent.
If some functionality has been cut of is not noticeable but certainly will and if it gets too low, I’ll look for an alternative, probably avira or something else
I’m not sure where you see any “back peddling”, but the protection is the same. Except in case of Script Blocker. But in most cases malware is already stopped by Network Shield or Web Shield.
Plus, they are enhancing the capabilities for avast! 5.x version with more control and improved protection.
Payable version will offer quantum updates every 10 minutes, Script Blocker and few extra goodies while free will have everything it has now plus more. So they are not going backwards but only forward, trust me.
Public beta test is going really slow now, but i know they are not resting, but working hard behind the scenes.
That banner there was basically just a test, besides, they have to get revenue from somewhere.
So they’ve added that banner there. It’s still far better than awful AVIRA popup or AVG’s popup thats constantly jumping out of the main window.
yeah I saw AVG new pop ups on my wife’s laptop (it’s too slow for Avast)…been running AVG a long time before switching to Avast, I would hate those pop ups, extremely ugly and disturbing while I hardly notice the banner on avast 4. The degree of protection that Avast offers for free is amazing, period. Same goes for Comodo if you ask me, once you’ve dismissed the hopsurf and co stuff at setup time ;D
Just playing with the latest Beta - seems to be reasonable so far.
Managed to get Gmail working without Avast complaining (with help from A’s forum).
Some programmes are a bit slow to open but that migh be until A ‘learns’ them.
