avast! Free Antivirus 8

The advent of Windows 8 is having a profound effect on user interface design. Hyperlinks and small buttons are out; big, touch-friendly panels are in. Avast! Free Antivirus 8 is the latest of many antivirus products to exhibit a Windows 8 redesign, along with some interesting new bonus features.

The biggest panel in the updated main window displays overall security status. It's not just color-coded red and green?a happy or unhappy face emphasizes the message. You will find that not all of the other panels actually function in the free edition. Clicking on the Firewall or SafeZone (sandbox) panel brings up an offer to "Activate" the feature by purchasing avast!'s security suite.

For a complete view of avast!'s commercial offerings, click the Market tab. Here you can purchase a variety of security tools for PC, Android, and Mac. This is also the place to sign up for a free credit alert service.

Some Installation Challenges
The product installed without incident on most of my malware-infested test systems. Ransomware on one system completely blocked access to the desktop, even in Safe Mode. Tech support advised opening Task Manager and killing a specific process. Doing so didn't bring back the desktop, but it allowed me to install avast! and run a full scan, which wiped out the ransomware.

On another test system, malware actively killed avast!'s installer and its associated process. After a few back-and-forth emails, the agent suggested remote assistance. After verifying that remote assistance would be available to any user, I agreed.

We couldn't use the Remote Assistance feature built into avast!, since the product could not install, but a third-party remote tool did the job. Even so, the malware repeatedly deleted the remote control tool, the avast! installer, and various other tools that the support agent brought to bear on the problem. It took the agent a couple hours of intense work to get avast! properly installed on this system.

Rating the Install Experience
For some years, I've scored antivirus products on their ability to remove malware in general and separately on their ability to remove malware that uses rootkit techniques to hide malicious activities. My latest malware collection doesn't include enough rootkit samples to reasonably report a separate rootkit score, so I've turned my thoughts to another facet of antivirus competence.

There's a wide variation in the way antivirus products handle cleaning up malware-infested systems. Quite a few examples of modern malware actively fight back against installation of security software, or prevent successful scanning. I've devised a rating system to reflect how well products handle this kind of resistance.

If the product installs and runs without incident on all my test systems, it gets five stars. If malware does manage to cause trouble, but the installer works around it, that's still good for five stars.

Quite a few vendors offer secondary cleanup tools to handle installation problems. These may come in the form of a rescue CD, a command-line no-install scanner, or a threat-specific cleanup tool. If the use of such ancillary tools allowed all my installations to complete successfully, that's worth four stars.

Sometimes the only recourse is to let tech support remote-control the affected system, to diagnose and actively fix whatever problem is preventing the antivirus from installing or running correctly. This can be very effective, but it's also intrusive, requiring significant attention from the user. If completing the test requires remote-control support, or a very lengthy series of email exchanges, I'll award three stars.

When remote-control support takes hours, it becomes a real time-waster for the user. You can't necessarily walk away and let the tech do the work. You'll frequently have to reboot the system, or supply specific information, or resume the connection. If getting any of my test systems working takes over an hour, I knock the score down to two stars.

In some cases, even with all the help tech support can offer, the product just never does install or scan correctly. If a product simply can't function on any one of my test systems, it's down to one star. And yet, that's not the lowest possible rating. Sometimes the cleanup process renders a system totally unusable. Perhaps it won't boot at all, or the keyboard doesn't work, or it can no longer connect to the Internet. If tech support can't solve this kind of collateral damage, if running the product effectively "killed" a test system, that product gets zero stars.

On this basis, avast! takes two stars for installation, because I had to spend over an hour with a support agent performing remote-control tech support.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/PAxJZtCkbss/0,2817,2416388,00.asp

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