Avira Premium Security Suite 10 review

We’ve regularly praised Avira’s security suite in the past, and this latest version makes only minor changes to the formula. The biggest new feature is the ProActiv module, which identifies potential threats by monitoring application behaviour and pooling information with other Avira users.

It isn’t a new idea – A-List champion Norton Internet Security 2010 has had a very similar feature for nine months – but you can’t complain about Avira catching up. You might, however, grumble when you learn that this major new attraction doesn’t currently work on 64-bit Windows.

Avira 10’s other headline features are a new GenericRepair feature that attempts to undo damage caused by malware, and a lick of virtual paint that brightens up the interface, although it’s still boxy and unintuitive.

Happily, Avira remains a winner thanks to its detection abilities, which through various versions we’ve always found to be excellent. This month, against 247 malware samples, Avira Premium Security Suite 10 achieved a 95% detection rate, equalling our A-List favourite Norton Internet Security 2010 against the same threats.

It remains a lightweight package too. Installing the software raised our test system’s idle RAM footprint from 590MB to 685MB, which is decidedly on the low side for a security suite. In comparison, Norton pushed memory usage up to 722MB.

Best of all, it didn’t add a single second to boot time, although we did see an additional eight seconds of CPU activity after the desktop appeared, compared to a clean system.

Despite this nimbleness, Avira packs in an awful lot of clever technology under the hood. The firewall, for example, gives you plenty of control over which events should cause an alert, and offers the intelligent option of automatically trusting any code certified by a vendor you’ve chosen to whitelist.

You can scan email using either POP3 or IMAP, prevent unknown processes from killing other programs, block suspicious iFrames on the web and even selectively password-protect parts of the interface – useful in partnership with the simple parental web controls. There’s also a backup module, but without online storage.

With all these options, and that unfriendly interface, Avira is likely to be daunting for the typical user. The three-PC licence is slightly more expensive than Norton’s too. But if you’ve only one computer to protect, the option of a single-PC licence lets you save money. And for technical users it’s an excellent choice, combining great detection abilities with a high degree of configurability.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith