As you all know i'm not one to pay for anything when i dont have to. Some may call this being cheap, personally i like to call it frugal and sensible.
As freelancer i dont want to have my computer at risk but on that same note i simply dont have the free cash to throw in for frankly awful anti viral solutions such as Norton or McAffee, at between £30-£50 ($56-$96 US) a year for software that slows down my computer and laptop to a crawl and uses up a significant amount of my processor resources while offering little to no real protection to my work.
Then I was directed to avast! by a fellow freelancer as a totally free and effective anti virus that would protect my computer wile taking almost none of my run time. The system updates from the same viral database as both McAffee and Norton on a bi-weekly basis and thus offering not only similar viral control but also updating on a more regular basis.
Now I should say a few words on the system interface, namely that it sucks the big one and looks like it belongs on windows 98 and takes a goddamn age to scan through your files, if you happen to have a hard drive bigger than 60-90GB and if you have a 1TB drive or more in your system then you may well have to give it overnight once a month in order to do a full scan and clean up.
Regardless it is an efficient and ridiculously simple to use system offering professional level protection from its normal Home Edition that will run on ANY system, even happily protecting my crappy little netbook. Remember you do not pay of your protection EVER but should you still feel a little unsafe or simply have too much money you can always purchase the professional edition and get the updated interface and access to some really good system retrieval tools and firewall settings for you work networks.
All in all its a great deal and if the interface were a little better it would have a flawless score but as it stands:
97% stonking great and well worth the download.Get it here:
http://www.avast.com/
