Avira is a well-established name in Germany, but the company has yet to make much of a name for itself in Australia. However, it certainly attracted our attention this month, when its free PersonalEdition Classic product achieved a remarkable 92% detection rate in our tests.

AntiVir’s user interface is fairly spartan: the few configurable features include scheduling system scans and updates, setting default behaviours when malware is detected and limiting on-access scanning to certain file types. This hardly seems necessary, as we rarely saw AntiVir make much of an impact on our CPU usage, but even when told to scan only executable files it still caught non-executable malware once we double-clicked on it.

Avira can be proud of catching more viruses than AVG, but, in many ways, its free edition is a lesser package. Notably, AntiVir doesn’t scan emails in transit, only inspecting files once you save them to your hard disk, meaning you could be left with malicious code sitting in your inbox.

What’s more, an intrusive nag window pops up each time the AntiVir database
is updated, pestering you to upgrade to the paid Premium version. You can prevent this by setting a security policy to prevent avnotify.exe from running, but you shouldn’t need to fight with your security software.

If you do invest €20 ($32) a year in the commercial version, extra features include additional spyware protection, internet advert blocking and access to a faster update server. You also gain integrated POP3 scanning, which we found to be fast and effective. We were a little disappointed, though, that it didn’t adopt the usual practice of flagging infected messages by modifying the subject lines.

AntiVir is the most effective free antivirus package we’ve seen, but Avira’s pushy attitude to advertising makes it a budget option rather than an overall winner. The paid-for edition is good value as security suites go, but it’s hard to justify not paying the extra for Kaspersky.