Version tested:  7.5.430

Description: AVG is a 100% free antivirus program that offers real time protection, on demand scanning, and email scanning. It also features automatic updates and a very small footprint that will not slow down your system. It does exactly what it promises and does it really well.

Although AVG is well known as a free antivirus program, I wanted to review it because the new version 7.5 (Oct 2006) seems to offer better protection than its predecessors

First, the good news:

AVG is a complete antivirus solution that features dependable real time protection as well on-demand virus scanning

AVG features auto updates, making it a good install-and-forget solution that you do not have to manually keep updating (some other ‘free' antivirus programs will force you to keep doing this in order to incentivize you to buy the paid version).

AVG has a remarkably small footprint, is light on memory use, and generally will not hog your system resources. Upon replacing Norton AV with AVG I noticed that my system boot time was three times faster and my system in general was noticeably more responsive, especially the time it took to acess files. If you suspect that your antivirus software is making everything unaccpetably sluggish then I recommend that you experiment with removing it and installing AVG.

AVG provides email virus protection for both incoming and outgoing emails. This is not to be taken for granted, since it is the one reason why AVG is my choice over Antivir, another excellent free antivirus which is excellent for both real time and on demand scanning but somehow does not offer email scanning. Given that I receive 100+ spam emails a day on one of my POP3 email accounts, this feature is really important to me.

Its Windows Vista ready