Avast 5

I've used Avast as my primary anti-virus solution for close to half-a-decade now. There are a number of reasons for this but the two foremost are it's free and non-bloated.

Anytime I get a new computer or setup a friend's computer, the first thing to go is Norton's solution. At first it was just anti-virus. It would always hog memory and slow down resources. Then came along their Security Suite which hogged even more resources.

After uninstalling Norton, Avast would always go on. I've never had any issues with it hogging up my resources. It's always been fast, clean, efficient, and reliable for me. All you had to do was register each year and turn off the annoying voice announcment every day when the definitions update.

It has caught most viruses through file-copy and file-download for me and have rarely seen one slip by unless someone hit ignore and let it continue. People! Read the warnings!

Today I read on cnet News that Avast 5 was released. It features a new GUI which makes things much more pleasant to look at and even easier to use. But what caught my attention the most is what I've never taken the time to research.

From cnet:

"In November 2009, Avast 4.8 and Microsoft Security Essentials were the only freeware to score Advanced+ in the Retrospective/Proactive Test done by AV Comparatives. It's also the only program that tested faster than Norton AntiVirus 2010, and was tied with Microsoft for second place in fewest false positives detected. The detection score was also high, at 98 percent. That's worse than Avira, but Avast noted far fewer false positives. ...Avast Free 5 [is] probably the strongest, free antivirus currently available."

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