Avast Free Antivirus 2015

By Neil J. Rubenking

Got antivirus? If not, stop reading this article and go install an antivirus utility. There are plenty to choose from, and some, like Avast Free Antivirus 2015, are completely free. With this edition, Avast adds a network protection scan that finds any problems with your home router's security. I'm a big fan of this network scan, but the product's central antivirus protection is just average.

The user interface hasn't changed much since last year. Oh, the colors are slightly different, but it still features four big panels for fast access to your favorite security components and a line of buttons down the left side to access everything else.

Out of the box, the four quick-access panels link to Browser Cleanup, Home Network Security, Software Update, and SecureLine VPN. A menu link in each panel lets you change that panel's association to any of 13 security components. I would recommend swapping in one of the system-scan choices.

Scan Choices In addition to the expected scan for malware, Avast offers three other security-related scans. It can check your installed programs for missing security patches, analyze your router's settings to flag security problems, and check for performance issues. Clicking Smart Scan runs all four scans in sequence. That's handy! I'll go into more detail about the additional scans later on.

A full scan of my standard test system took 32 minutes, just a little above the current average of 27 minutes. With some products, a repeat scan runs extremely quickly. Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015, for example, managed a second scan in less than a minute. Avast's repeat scan still took 23 minutes, but that's some improvement.

Real-time Protection For some antivirus products, the minimal file access that occurs when Windows Explorer displays the filename is sufficient to trigger real-time protection. Avast waits until just before a program executes to run a real-time scan. In testing, it wiped out almost 80 percent of my malware samples immediately on launch.

Avast detected most of the remaining samples at some point as they attempted to install and run. In a couple of cases, it activated a powerful analysis tool called DeepScan. Avast also invoked DeepScan to make sure that a couple of my malware-testing programs weren't themselves malicious.

In one case, fortunately the last sample I tested, Avast requested a boot time scan for complete cleanup. That scan took almost an hour, and required my attention every so often to make decisions about the disposition of particular malware traces. You can launch a boot time scan at will, if you suspect the regular scan has missed something.

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Avast Free Antivirus 2015