- #REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY FULL#
- #REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY SOFTWARE#
- #REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY PC#
This added a neat toolbar to our Outlook 2013 ribbon, then blocked an impressive 91 percent of our test junk mails, no tweaking required. Most people won’t care about that example - its obscurity is why we use Grabit for testing in the first place - but it’s still a little concerning that a legitimate program can be affected in this way, with no easy fix.įortunately our faith was restored with the excellent spam filter. One problem remained from last year: Usenet reader Grabit was unable to run searches unless Avast’s shields were disabled.
As with most other suite components, it’s exceptionally configurable, too. Banking sites correctly opened in SafeZone it’s available on demand for everything else, and our SafeZone activities were entirely invisible to keyloggers and other system tools.Īvast’s firewall was another major plus, intelligently blocking network attacks and correctly controlling web access, without any annoying alerts. We had huge problems with this in the 2014 edition - it crashed our test PC, repeatedly - but this time there were no issues at all. You can scan particular files only, ignore certain MIME types, define packers to extract, block named URLs all the time, and choose what to do if a virus is found: it’s extremely flexible.Īvast’s SafeZone offers a secure environment where you can bank online, make web payments and more, all safely isolated from the rest of your system. This blocked around two thirds of our test URLs, a reasonable score, but the highlight here is probably Avast’s configurability. If you’ve clicked on a link already - in a web page, an email, maybe a document - then Avast’s Web Shield checks it for you. You probably won’t see these too often, but it’s a simple and reasonably effective system. But its overall results still don’t stand out in any major way.Īvast’s web protection starts with your search engine results, where icons are used to warn you of some dangerous sites. There are no big, obvious problems here, and Avast Internet Security 2015 does offer some worthwhile improvements: TSL/SSL scanning worked well for us (although others have reported problems), and support for hardware-based virtualization better isolates processes in their own virtual machine. The suite had no problem locating and removing our malware samples, but the independent testing labs aren’t so encouraging, with AV-Comparatives and AV-Test typically placing Avast around the middle/ lower middle of their results tables.
#REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY PC#
Still, it didn’t make a significant difference to our PC performance when running other tasks. More thorough antivirus scans achieved average speeds only, and the program won’t back off if you’re doing something else. That’s not something we expect to see in a commercial program, but at least it can be turned off in a few seconds (Settings > General > Smart Scan). Avast’s GrimeFighter isn’t even included with the product, so this is no more than an advert, which tells you about any "problems" and then requires that you pay more cash to solve them. The Smart Scan doesn’t take quite as long as you’d think - under two minutes on our test PC - but, annoyingly, by default it runs a "GrimeFighter" check for junk files. The Overview screen now opens with a Smart Scan option, too, which runs all these checks at once.
#REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY SOFTWARE#
There are separate scans to check for missing software patches, and (new this time) network security issues.
#REVIEWS AVAST INTERNET SECURITY FULL#
You can run a quick scan, check your full system, removable media, schedule a boot scan, or right-click anything of interest in Explorer and choose the "Avast…" option to check for threats. It’s a comfortable working environment, then, and even Avast newbies will soon be ready to explore what the package has to offer.Īvast Internet Security 2015 offers many scanning options. An Overview tab provides one-click access to scanning and other common tasks (each of these buttons can be customized with your choice of function), while menus give more in-depth access to the suite’s features. The Avast interface has seen some tweaks, but remains easy enough to use. There were no demands to remove "incompatible software" beforehand (even though our test PC was already equipped with Norton Internet Security), and no need to reboot afterwards: the suite just installed and displayed its main console, a helpful "tutorial" pointing out a few new features. Installing the program proved simple and straightforward. A new "Home Network Security" tool scans your network for security issues, while the "Smart Scan" provides a quick and easy way to check your system for vulnerabilities. This new release further improves your security by blocking "potentially unwanted programs", like browser toolbars and similar adware.