It's incredibly popular, and now a big overhaul looks like fixing AVG's one weak spot.
If you've switched to incredibly popular AVG Free antivirus, next week's AVG 8.0 worldwide launch on Thursday 28th should be of interest.
We're told AVG 8.0 Free will arrive in the "next few months", but in the meantime, the Thursday launch of the commercial version will give the millions of AVG Free users a taste of what's to come.
Top of the list is an entirely new multithreaded scanning engine combining antivirus and antispyware, which AVG claims will retain a reputation for fast, efficient scanning.
However it's the updated firewall which has grabbed our attention. Firewall performance was the one weak spot in our tests of AVG 7.5, which is why we're pleased to hear that it's been entirely rewritten.
The good news is AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 will also incorporate some of the LinkScanner exploit protection technology brought onboard from Exploit Prevention Labs. Users will get real-time warnings about "poisoned" Web pages.
New in the commercial AVG 8.0 products will be the full LinkScanner safe surf and safe search protection, rootkit detection, MSN and ICQ protection, plus HTTP scanning of files, data and documents when downloaded.