AVG is a popular anti-virus software along with others like Norton and McAfee. So I decided to see how well it did compared so some other anti-virus software. I decided to test the AVG Internet Security 2011 instead of the free version because they gave a free 90 day trial to see how well it works and I wanted to see if it worked. I will go back and try again later with the free version to see the difference between the two.
If you have not read the first review check out it here:
http://localtechrepair.blogspot.com/2011/07/clamwin-and-clam-sentinel-review-on.html
this gives detail on what links I used for the malware.
Performance:
I just wanted to start out by saying that AVG Internet Security 2011 did not pick up every virus and malware so even the paid version still needs help by other things like spybot, malwarebytes, or/and superantispyware. But it did do a lot better than clam did to say the least.
AVG has some nice features like integration into the web browser to help warn people of virus infected sites. This should help some of the less techy people out there see a visual sign that something is wrong. Though only one of the sites did it not let me at all go to the site where the others gave me an option to bypass the warning.
AVG was able to block some of the applications from installing in the first place with is good for prevention though it did not prevent all of them. It was only able to block 4 while they where trying to install. This is better than nothing but not perfect either. It was able to detect running processes after some of the viruses where installed (5 of them). This is nice but I would rather of had it block it before it was installed but still did not make me have to scan for them.
While scanning it did a whole system scan and was able to find 1 infected file and 4 warnings which where corrupted exe from viruses that tried to download. The scan for a 10 gb hard drive took ~13mins.
AVG gives you the option of the priority that you want the scan to go I left it at the default for the scan though giving it high priority would probably speed up the time but make it less likely for the user to work on the computer while scanning.
Though AVG did not pick up everything and could not uninstall everything.
While running in Hiren Boot CD I ran different tests to see what it missed.
Superantispyware was able to find 4 adware and 1 rootkit and remove them.
Avira was able to find 5 infections.
Normal mode:
Malwarebytes found 12+2 = 14
Spybot Search & Destory found 1
AVG Internet Security 2011 missed a total of ~24 malware/virus and possible more that the programs above did not find.
Conclusion
AVG did a fairly good job and probably would have don't a lot better if we listened to the warnings that they gave while on the Internet we may have been in a better place. Though this still has room to grow in its protection of viruses sense the internet is not the only one place that can give you viruses. The performance of the scan speed was not bad at all compared to that of clam. Though on the performance of the the software on the ram side while idle the software was using 230MB of ram while scanning on default mode it was using 334MB of ram and while on High Priority scan it used 375MB. For a slow computer this may be acceptable but it depends on the users. Though for a windows xp computer with a half a GB of ram this and other things starting up this may be little to ram heavy for those computers.
Thanks for Reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin
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