Secure Computing: Free Virus Protection With AVG Free Edition

One of the most effective and popular free anti-virus utilities available today is Grisoft’s AVG Free Edition. Installation is straight forward for the most part. You will want to make sure there is a free license already included when installing as shown here.

Note: This example uses the AVG 8.0 installer but the same process applies to all newer editions!

Installation is a smooth process although you may be asked if you want to install the toolbar during installation. The toolbar allows you to activate additional security features but will not be necessary for you as most new browsers already include good protection.

After a successful installation, a wizard begins to prompt for specific settings for the utility. One of the most important is to get the latest updates for the virus database.

Other settings to select are what time to perform a daily scan and register with AVG. You can go through the wizard or skip the process entirely as changes can be made later.

All settings and components can be controlled from the User Interface. AVG Free Edition includes more than just anti-virus protection. Other components include:

• In-Built Anti-Spyware Protection against malicious software applications
• Integrated Email Scanner
• Resident Shield Real-Time Protection against viruses and malicious spyware

You can control the speed of a full system scan, the faster the scan the more CPU processing power required if you want to continue to use the computer while the scan is running. Details of detections are shown in the user interface as detected. This is where you can also pause, start, or resume a scan.

There are a surprising amount of settings and options to customize how AVG works. This is where to control scan schedules and a whole host of other options.

Pop up notifications are shown near the clock on the taskbar.

All email messages will also be scanned and this will be verified by a message at the bottom of each email. Also, as with the other anti-virus applications we have covered, AVG integrates into Windows Explorer so you can scan individual files by right clicking.

Conclusion
AVG is so popular for a reason: the user interface is attractive and quite easy to use and there's also a bunch of options available to allow you to customize the behaviour to your liking. It also offers a lot of components and options that are only available in the professional version of other utilities, at the great price of … well ‘free’!