AVG Anti Virus 7.5o

Having ultimately given up hope of ever getting McAfee’s VirusScan 11 to behave itself – as chronicled in an earlier posting to Storm Gods – we began a brave and valiant quest for a suitable replacement. There’s a growing pantheon of security applications available… because there’s big bucks in paranoia.

We settled on AVG Anti Virus 7.5 by Grisoft, a developer in the Czech Republic. AVG Anti Virus 7.5 offers a powerful suite of security tools, an aggressively updated virus checker, advanced user controls and software support that actually supports their products – the latter being somewhat unique in the arena of security products.

AVG Anti Virus 7.5 includes a virus scanner, a resident shield, automatic e-mail scanning and pretty well all the toys a security package should include. We were pleased to find that they all worked extremely well, and imposed no measurable speed or performance penalties on the system AVG Anti Virus was installed on – an insurmountable issue with the McAfee VirusScan 11 product.

In addition, AVG Anti Virus 7.5 doesn’t get its undies in a bunch if you decide not to install one or more of its components. We ultimately decided to pass on the resident shield and e-mail scanner. It will warn you that you’ve omitted part of the protection it offers, but its warnings can be disabled.

The user interface for AVG Anti Virus 7.5 is uncluttered and can be mastered in seconds. It installs with an icon in the system tray area of Windows’ desktop – right-click on the icon to access a menu with items for the Test Center, to manually scan for viruses, and the Virus Vault, to deal with any suspicious objects the software turns up.

AVG Anti Virus 7.5 is an impressive security package – it generates few false positives, and can be easily configured to do as much or as little as you like. It’s easy to navigate, and we’ve yet to encounter anything that even resembled an interaction issue between AVG Anti Virus 7.5 and anything running on its host system.

Our initial e-mailed support questions were answered promptly, by an actual human being.

The ideal security application is one that you can almost forget has been installed – aside from its periodic automatic upgrades, AVG Anti Virus 7.5 comes pretty close to this standard. It does what it does well, and keeps its head down the rest of the time.