The problem with AV software is that is great one year then crap the next. I remember when Norton ruled by such a huge margin everyone struggled to keep up, then in one update became blaotware and destroyed their advantage in the market. AVG or Kaspersky could blow it next year. I think its important to keep an eye on how they are preforming year in year out and change as needed, certainly AVG is great for casual home user, but for a power user or someone with questionable surfing habits something harder like kaspersky would be better.

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Love is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets pregnant

Its always wise to evaluate or products before you choose, I have seen first hand lately AGV fail miserably as well as military issued Macaffe so price is never the main reason. I was given a free sample copy of Bullguard which has so far proven very trustworthy plus the license allow for 3 separate installations and they also do a gamers edition that I am hoping to test soon.

I normally recommend to my customers to use Deluxe Shield 2008 which is a licensed copy of Kasperky that is customised in house. If they are using the net for Online banking etc they would be foolish to trust the free products which can easily overcome by zero day virus ending up with costs far exceeding the price of the 3 mentioned earlier.

In the end it depends what you use your system for.

Edited by OZSlayer: 8/10/2008 05:21:22 PM

Reviewers and testers have enough of a problem comparing security products with similar functionality and coming up with meaningful results. Yet here, we see a free entry-level product being compared with a more functional commercial product. Hardly a fair or relevent comparison in the context given.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is regarded by many as simply the best FREE anti-virus and anti-spyware protection available. But it's still entry-level protection for free, which is something that Kaspersky just doesn't provide. The result is that there are some two million AVG users in Australia and over 80 million worldwide.

If you want to compare like with like, compare AVG's paid for offerings with the equivalent Kaspersky paid for products. And then test how well Kaspersky does at providing real-time protection against web threats, the fastest growing threat vector being used by cyber criminals. AVG's patent pending LinkScanner technology provides the only true real-time protection against web threats.

Best Regards, Lloyd Borrett
Marketing Manager, AVG (AU/NZ)
Australian & New Zealand distributors of AVG Anti-Virus & Internet Security Products.
www.avg.com.au

AVG isn't best, it causes more issues than the viruses do themselves. I recommend Avast.

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Vito Cassisi: Tech Blog

if you are an ordinary PC user then just dump Windows altogether, get used to browsing with Firefox, read your email from Thunderbird, write your documents using Open Office and run them all on a free Linux operating system.

Viruses are just unwanted programmes that install on your PC, it's probably quite hard to install a Windows programme (read virus) on a Linux machine so running a different operating system would mean that you don't need to splash out an expensive new hardware to satisfy the requirements of Microsoft Vista and you can save the dosh that Microsoft would have got for something else you really need

It still doesnt compete with the market leaders. The only good things that come free are either hacked or pirated. You cant tell me (or others) you free product is great if you intend on staying in business trying to sell your paid-for version (which performs better).

Still doesnt address the issues faced when it comes time to remove it and use a better, faster, less resource draining product. Too much crap is left behind requiring manual registry editing. While your at it, resolve the issues that your older versions like 7.5 dont clean out when upgrading.

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Gone

No one has mentioned that the paid for version of avg can give an error - computer needs to be rebooted before updates are installed. The only problem is, that even after reboot, the updates are still not installed. If this happens with the paid version, what else is happening with the freebie version?