I have been hearing nothing but bad reports about AVG in the last six months or so. While I have never used AVG,
I have had friends that have used it and they used to be happy. But still, in the AV product market, the best performance is only to be found in a few of the paid AV’s and no full featured freeware AV has ever been in what I would call the top tier of AV performance. And sadly unlike the firewall market where the best product, IMHO, is Comodo3, and thus freeware tops the list.
And in many ways, the AV avast freeware and the AVG freeware versions were very similar in terms of virtues and detection rates. But the key word is WERE in the past tense. And not only that, both AVG and Avast as freeware
versions were full featured AV’s and in terms of freeware, they both used to lead the freeware class. Out preforming many paid AV’s but still not quite the equal of paid AV’s like Kaspersky, NOD32. and Antivirus. Nor are the paid versions of AVG or Avast much better in terms of performance.
But AVG, for whatever reasons, has really taken itself out of the AV market in MHO. First, the freeware version has opted to become not full featured and hence crippleware. Because after 30 days, the prescanning of incoming email stops. Thus putting AVG on the same footing as the Avira antivirus personal freeware version. But AVG can’t
come close to competing with the much better Avira in terms of performance. Second, AVG 8 has gone the bloatware route without gaining any performance to justify it. I am also hearing reports that AVG is not compatible with firefox3 to go along with just a flood of negative reports on many forums.
Meaning Avast is now, IMHO and also backed by testing organizations, the best full featured freeware AV and Antivirus personal edition freeware, is the best preforming AV even though it lacks incoming email prescanning. IMHO, the choice is now depending on how much a given user needs incoming email scanning if they want a freeware AV.
The sad implication is what happens if Avast, due to lack on paying subscribers, is forced to to go the AVG route,
and it least drop some of its full features to get more to pay?
But I am eagerly awaiting any comodo entry in to the possibly freeware AV market. But before I make any decisions, I will have to see the unbiased tests to show comodo can run with the performance leaders.