My favorite free antivirus solution, Avast! Home, has just hit a huge milestone. Over 40 million people have requested a free registration code since it all started back in January 2002. Looking back over the past announcements you can see that the last year has proven to be quite exciting for Avast!:
- October 30, 2006 – 20 million Avast! Home users
- February 9, 2007 – 25 million Avast! Home users
- May 11, 2007 – 30 million Avast! Home users
- August 9, 2007 – 35 million Avast! Home users
- October 22, 2007 – 40 million Avast! Home users
When people are looking for a free antivirus I always recommend Avast! or AVG. They may not be the best antivirus on the market, but both offer enough protection for the users out there. And not having to worry about paying for a license renewal every year is a huge benefit.
To celebrate the event Avast! is providing 20% off all their products using coupon code 40 Million when checking out. This deal will last for the next 20 days.
I’m still curious as to whether they will end up charging for their Windows Home Server edition that is currently open to public Beta testing. It is extremely well integrated into the operating system, and makes it easy to manage Avast! on several different computers.
Avast! Anti-virus is arguably the greatest free software product available.
Its good to see that its doing so well. I’m probably cost Norton thousands of dollars over the past few years
I am SO glad it works with Vista, I did NOT want to use the ‘free sign-your-life-away’ trial of Norton that came with my new machine. Soon as I got Avast working I removed Norton (gee did I just void the warranty by doing that)?
Just because 40 million have requested a license doesn’t mean that, “40 Million Users Protected By Avast! Home”. Many of those users would have switch to other products over the years. In fact, I’m sure a lot of those users have requested multiple licenses over the years as well.
It’s am important milestone but I doubt that 40 million computers are protected by Avast! Home today.
I would be interested to know from how many unique users request a virus definition update each month. Assuming that each user updates the virus definition at least one-a-month, that would give a more accurate result.
Void a warranty by removing an application? I don’t think that’s how it works, but I’ve never really read into it.
That’s a good point, and surprisingly one that I hadn’t thought about. I would guess that a little over half are unique users.
You never know…