Labs

As a free package that's been around in various incarnations since 1988, Avast has built up quite a following: last month, it announced the 30 millionth registration of its free Home Edition.

This long history, however, expresses itself principally in a dated user interface: its default appearance is an industrial steel-effect console designed to resemble a car stereo, which makes little sense and jars against the rest of the Windows interface. When a virus is detected, you're alerted by a lurid yellow bar at

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the bottom of the screen, which is suitably conspicuous, but further muddles the visual style.

The application seemed slightly clunky in use, too: successfully intercepting an infected web download caused the browser to redirect to an error page. Sometimes, when we asked Avast to move an infected file into its "chest", it simply responded that it couldn't access the file. On other occasions, it reported no error but left a 0-byte file behind.

The program seemed to have even more trouble under Vista: when we tried to remove a particular variant of the Tibs downloader and a generic Dropper trojan under Home Basic, we were told "this option is not supported" and "there are no more files".

In terms of malware detection, Avast placed near the bottom of the pack, identifying and removing just 70% of malware overall. In our email tests, it identified a further 4% of malware, but was for some reason unable to remove the infected attachments.

They say you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but even for free there are slicker, more effective antivirus solutions than Avast.