Labs

The last time we reviewed Alwil's avast! Antivirus (Home Edition) we liked its virus detection but were bemused by its dual interface. It has a normal interface for changing settings for the different scanners, and a futuristic-looking Simple User Interface window for running scans. Users will get used to it quickly, and it can be skinned if you fancy a change.

As with most anti-virus software, avast! continually monitors your system for incoming viruses, which means that most of the time

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you can leave it to keep an eye on things. But there is no shortage of settings to play with, which is impressive for a free program. This is in strong contrast to AVG Free Edition, which is more limited. You need to know what you're doing, though, as some of the settings are designed for computer experts. Do you want to disable scanning for WSH script files? If you know about Windows Scripting Host files, you might know the answer.

The software will happily scan email, P2P traffic and files that come in via internet messaging. You can tell it to ignore certain file types, if you're sure about their contents. But avast! Antivirus 4.6 wasn't sure about the contents of our samples. It was the least-effective virus scanner tested here, narrowly beating Panda Titanium to the bottom spot. It ignored several Trojans, one of which successfully disabled the Windows firewall, allowing potential attackers remote control of the system.

It might be free, but until avast!'s detection abilities improve we'd rather pay for protection rather than compromise with this free package.