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The bottom line: Avast continues to push the envelope of top-shelf free security features with hybrid update tech, file reputation analysis, and more. It's independent benchmarks are a bit weak, but more than 150 million people trust Avast to keep them safe.

Review:
Looking to compete with both paid and free security suites, Avast wants to create a unified approach to your computer security. Long gone are the days of the quirky interface. Avast is accessible and robust, with an impressive list of free features and strong, though hardly stellar, performance benchmarks.
Avast 2012 gets bigger antivirus cannons

Installation
Avast has improved its installation process so it's faster than before. It's not the fastest on the market, not by a longshot, but a standard installation took us about three minutes.

Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.

Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.

The current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer both block forced add-on installation. When you run one of those browsers for the first time after installing Avast, they'll ask you if you want to allow the new add-on.

On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot, and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 percent, although it's still a large download at around 70MB for the free version.

A new Avast installation option, available only from the custom install menu, lets you sideload Avast as a secondary security program to supplement your main one. We're not big fans of this option from a security point-of-view, because it can bog down your system resources without actually making you safer. However, for seeing if you like Avast, it's not a bad thing as long as you remember to choose one security suite to go with.

Read more: Avast Internet Security - Download.com http://download.cnet.com/Avast-Internet-Security/3000-18510_4-75095376.html#ixzz1tXNFr8LN



Interface
Avast 7's interface hasn't changed much over the past three versions. There've been some decorative changes, a darkening of color here, lightening of grays there, but the changes have been either lightly cosmetic or utilitarian. For example, there are big graphics to illustrate the more nebulous security concepts that only have an on-or-off switch. This may sound useless, but it's actually quite clever because it helps you visualize how one of the more complex Avast features is keeping you safe without bogging you down in jargon.

Highlighted with the familiar security colors of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version, and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 7 if you're using the free version, and an option to connect an Avast account. (This is for the Avast Web management tool, expected to be live about a month from when this review is published.)

The Summary tab contains two submenus, Cloud Services and Statistics. The former shows you how Avast's servers help protect you, and offers a Settings button.

The latter is for those intrepid folks who're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats. It's where you can get your math geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.
Avast 2012 includes a hybrid update technology for pushing out security updates to you faster.

Avast 2012 includes a hybrid update technology for pushing out security updates to you faster.
(Credit: Avast)

The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Shields are listed on the left, or you can choose one from the interactive shield wheel in the main window.

Click a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield, and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.

The Additional Protection tab leads to the AutoSandbox, Browser Protection, Remote Assistance, and Site Blocking tools. Avast Pro Antivirus and Avast Internet Security users also get Antispam, Sandbox, and SafeZone options. The Maintenance and Market tabs round out the options. As you might expect, Maintenance is for updating the program, checking out quarantine (called Virus Chest,) and managing your subscription, while the Market tab is a new option for buying extra security components.

Features and support
While these tools are clearly non-essential, and some of the prices struck as high--$10 for a Rescue disc? $50 for an annual backup service?--we like that Avast gives its fans a chance to stay in its eco-system. The Avast EasyPass, for example, is an Avast-branded version of RoboForm's premium password manager and is well worth the $9.99 annual fee.

Avast 2012, aka Avast 7, includes several new features that directly impact your security. One of the biggest changes is a hybrid update technology that pushes out updates in real time. Because a full database update isn't required, Avast users will get their security updates much faster than before. Full database updates will also be pushed out, just not as frequently.

Another important security change introduces a file reputation system for evaluating downloads. This tech has existed for a couple of years in paid security suites like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, but Avast is the first free antivirus to offer it. It leverages community data from Avast's enormous active user base to help determine if a file is safe.

Avast's WebRep browser add-on for instant Web site safety evaluation has been extended to work with Safari, and it will also now check for fake certificates. Faked security certificates were an unexpected problem last year, demonstrating how fragile Web security protocol could be.

In a half-day of testing, none of these appeared to cause any negative impact on computer or browsing performance. Assuming these technologies work as advertised, your computer ought to be a fair bit safer from malware with them.

And although we're more than half a year away from Windows 8, Avast has included some attention for the forthcoming Windows 8 beta, also known as the Consumer Preview, gets some attention from Avast as the suite includes an Early-Load Antimalware Driver (ELAM) for guarding against system-level rootkits.
Avast's browser add-on now works in Safari (not pictured), and paid users can force their browsers to always run sandboxed from a single checkbox.

Avast's browser add-on now works in Safari (not pictured), and paid users can force their browsers to always run sandboxed from a single checkbox.
(Credit: Avast)

The free version of Avast is arguably the most comprehensive set of freely available security features on the market. There's a reason these guys have more than 150 million active users (at the time this review was written). The antivirus, antispyware, and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. Along with the new features, it's got an AutoSandbox for automatically walling off suspicious programs; a full complement of shields that guard against scripts, P2P networks, instant messaging, and potentially dangerous program behavior; a silent/gaming mode; on-demand boot scanning; and a healthy output of statistics for the data nerds.

Avast's sandbox, by the way, automatically places programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created, or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.

The company hasn't said whether the virtualized state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features. The AutoSandbox will now advise you when you're done using it as to how best to handle the program in the future.

The AutoSandbox for free users is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.

You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox, or you can deactivate the feature entirely.

In addition to these core security features, Avast has some nifty extras to help you out. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode.

There's a sidebar desktop gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customizations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.

Meanwhile, new in Avast Free is the Remote Assistance feature, for single-instance, friend-to-friend remote tech support. Part of the main Avast interface, all the other person has to have is...Avast.

It's a good way to get others to install the program, but this isn't the only single-serving tech support option around. Still, in our tests, it worked fine. One person shares a code with the other, and voila! Instant remote PC access. Simply close the window to break the connection.

Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG and Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's Web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.

There weren't many big changes for Avast Pro Antivirus or Avast Internet Security users, but there were improvements made to the Safe Zone and Browser Sandbox features. The Browser Sandbox now lets you force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari to always run sandboxed away from your system. SafeZone now automatically asks you when you're about to perform a browser-based financial transaction if you'd like to switch to the SafeZone mode.

Performance
As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.

CNET Labs determined that Avast has a fairly light touch on your computer's performance. Avast Free 2012 scored well below the average impact on startup time, and had the least impact of all suites tested on your PC's shutdown time. Scans were faster than average, beating big names like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, a tad slower than AVG, but not as fast as Trend Micro or Webroot.

Security Program Boot time Shutdown time Scan time MS Office performance iTunes decoding Media multitasking Cinebench
Unprotected system 40 6 n/a 395 120 342 17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date) 67.4 16.2 1,058 414 125 347 17,129
Avast Free Antivirus 2012 55.2 9.6 800 412 126 347 16,976
Avast Pro Antivirus 2012 69.8 11.3 732 402 126 343 17,148
Avast Internet Security 2012 63.6 12.2 831 407 125 346 17,060

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.

Avast performed better than average on the MS Office test, around average on iTunes Decoding and Media Multitasking, and a bit worse than average in our Cinebench test. On the key end-user experiences of its impact on your startup and shutdown times, and scan time performance, Avast won't make you want to walk a plank out of frustration.

All the security features in the world do you no good if they don't keep you safe, and on that count Avast performs well in general. However, as results from independent efficacy testing groups indicate, Avast could've had a better 2011.

AV-Test.org gave the previous version of Avast a passing rating in its most recent test, on a Windows 7 computer from December 2011. Avast 6 barely passed with the minimum passing score of 11 out of 18. It reached 4 out of 6 in Protection, 3.0 out of 6 in Repair, and a 5 out of 6 in Usability, for a total of 12. Usability includes testing for false positives, which Avast suffered on.

AV-Comparatives.org also saw room for improvement in Avast during November 2011. The suite blocked only 93.6 percent of threats tested during that month, which could then be kicked up to a more respectable 95.9 percent with some settings tweaks by the user. Looking at January 2011 to November 2011, Avast did much better, blocking 95.6 percent outright and bumping to 97.5 percent with adjusted settings.

As far as certification goes, Avast received the Advanced+ certification from AV-Comparatives for the first half of 2011, but only Standard certification in the second half. Right now, we doubt that this is going to cause much consternation among Avast fans, but a full year of weak scores could smite the ardor of even the most enthusiastic fan.

Judging from these results, Avast has to make some changes to its detection rates quickly to convince people that its strong feature set is worth it.

Conclusion
When it comes to your security, Avast 2012 gets a lot right. It's got a usable, uncluttered interface, solid although not stellar benchmarks, and a set of features that keeps it at the forefront of Windows security.

It's true that the changes to the suite better improve its performance in efficacy tests or there could be serious problems, but for now we've got three key reasons for enthusiastically recommending Avast Antivirus Free 2012 as an Editors' Choice for free security suite. First, it's got the most aggressively forward-thinking feature set of the free suites. Second, it's very good at protecting you. It's not the best at it, but it does what it does well, and that leads to the third reason it's earned its award: it protects you without dragging your PC into the mud. Few people want security that makes a good machine run like an old one, and on that count, Avast has your back.
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Publisher's Description
From AVAST Software:

Avast Internet Security has all the features of Avast Free Antivirus, plus a Silent Firewall, an antispam filter, a command-line scanner, and the new Avast SafeZone (a clean, isolated desktop, so that other applications--even