Product Review- Avira AntiVir Personal

Product Review-Avira AntiVir Personal
Vendor: Avira GmbH
Type: Antivirus
Platform: Windows XP/Vista
Download Link: Free-AV.Com
Rating: 4.5/5

Avira AntiVir Personal from Avira GmbH comes back with a faster scanning speed and a new look. Best of all, it's free of charge.

Avira has it's well known "umbrella" logo and simple but unique interface. Now it has been upgraded to a sleek, silverish look. The upgrade comes free, as always, to users using the (Free) Avira AntiVir Personal. Existing users can upgrade to it by right clicking the antivirus icon and clicking "Start Update".

The whole new interface has been applied to most (I think all) of the Avira windows-The control panel, the updater, the scanner, ...

As announced on the website, the scanning speed has been improved by quite a lot. I can now see that the bar is moving faster than the old version of Avira.

Unlike some free trials that disable updating after a certain time (Usually 30 days), the "Avira Guard" and the update system remain intact (If you download the Avira AntiVir Personal). Some setbacks are that the Updater has low piority (Premium and paying users get higher piority) and that an advertisement (No viruses, adware, or other such. The advertisements only try to convince you to upgrade to Avira AntiVir Premium...)

Avira's scanning options are very flexible, with the options of scanning the Local Drives, Local Hard Drives, Removable Drives (CD, USB, things that are plugged in to the computer that is a storage area and can be pulled out), Windows System Directory, Complete System Scan, My Documents, Active Processes (This scan is very useful if you don't want to slow down your computer that much but want to see if theres any viruses running, although full system scan is more effective.), Rootkit Search, and Manual Selection (You select the drives that are to be scanned.)

Avira comes with it's own "AntiVir Guard", which scans on demand. Avira also comes with a quarantine area where infected files are stored and cannot do harm while in quarantine.

You can schedule scanning times and there is a section set aside that features the scanning reports.

Overall, Avira is very good but the looks make it go down. The full scan scanning is very powerful but takes a while to sift through your files.

Avira's interface is very easy to work about and the options for Avira is customizable.

-FyreVortex
-Byzone Founder and Contributing Author