Resident protection (the real-time protection of the operating system), is one of the most important parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is able to detect a virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.

Avast features a module for the protection of IM (Instant Messaging, "chat") programs, and a module for the protection of P2P (peer-to-peer) programs. The list of supported IM and P2P programs is extensive with more than 30 programs currently supported.

Web Shield is a unique feature of avast! that enables it to monitor and filter all HTTP traffic coming from the Web sites on the Internet. Since an increasing number of viruses (and other malware, such as adware, spyware and dialers) are being distributed via the World Wide Web, the need for an effective countermeasures has also increased.

NEW AntiSpyware remover and free AntiVirus remover protects against spyware, viruses, trojans, adware, spam, phishing and Internet identity theft. If your system is crashing, incredibly slow, have spam mail, or covered with pop-up ads, you probably have spyware.

Automatic updates are another need in virus protection. Both the virus database and the program itself can be updated automatically. The updates are incremental, with only new or missing data downloaded: thus reducing the transfer heavily. The typical size of a virus database update are tens of KB; program updates are typically in the hundreds of KB range.

The Virus Chest can be thought of as a folder on your disk drive, having special properties that make it a safe, isolated place suitable for storing certain files. You can work with the files in the Chest, though with some security restrictions.

avast! antivirus features outstanding integration into your system. A scan can be started directly from Windows Explorer, by clicking a folder or a file with your right mouse button and selecting the corresponding choice from the menu.

Since version 4.1, avast! includes the Virus Cleaner, a tool designed for a complete removal of most common infections from already-infected computers. So now is avast! capable even to reliably heal (not only detect) the most common malware.

avast! Home/Professional now fully supports the 64-bit Windows platform. ALWIL Software is anticipating massive take-up of this platform, as Windows XP 64-Bit Edition will support up to 32 GB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory, enabling applications to run faster when working with large data sets.

Commitment to internationalization is one of the key benefits of avast!. During the last 2 years, avast! has been translated to a number of languages and the latest version added additional language modules.