We were getting quite a few tips over the last day regarding the new version of AVG free that was just released. As you might recall AVG 8.0 Pro was made available several months ago, and it is a pretty comprehensive security suite. It wasn’t bad, but to me it seemed pretty bloated.
Now the free version of AVG 8.0 is available, and I gave it a whirl real quick to see what it all included. I actually like the free version better than the paid version because it seems a lot simpler. It includes the antivirus and anti-spyware portions which are very important, and excludes the anti-spam, firewall, and anti-rootkit. The parts it excludes are things most people can live without out.
There are a few things that actually really impressed me though. The first being that I was able to install AVG 8 Free and get it running without ever being required to restart my computer. That’s a huge plus in my book because having to restart after installing a program can really be a pain.
And then there is memory usage. To my surprise AVG 8 Free was pretty light on its toes. After running it for about 15-minutes it was only using up about 1.8MB. When I started to perform a full system scan the process took up about 18MB, and used a little over 20% of my processor consistently. Not bad at all, and my system still felt very responsive.
If you’re already using AVG then I think it’s worth taking the upgrade, but I don’t think this offers a whole lot to grab new new users if they’re already sitting happy with Avast or another free antivirus solution. The new interface is definitely way better than AVG 7 though.
Get AVG 8 Free [via Download Squad]
Thanks to everyone for the tips!
great review, thanx.
any tests regarding detection rate? is it better worse? compared with other free AVs.
I only found out about the release of V8 Pro (we have the paid version as a company) when the free version was released. Not great advertising to existing customers on Grisoft’s part! Mind, it’s given them time to bed it in and you’re right – the interface is way better.
In particular, the command line scanner used when you download from, say, MSN is far slicker. A shame it still has to pop up a DOS box, but the little popups in the corner are much less obtrusive than the huge centre-screen ones in 7.5.
If you’re upgrading from 7.5 to 8 then you will need to reboot as part of the install. A shame, but otherwise nice and smooth.
Not relevant to the free version, I know, but the firewall doesn’t remember settings from the 7.5 version you’re upgrading from, which is a minor inconvenience. Just means going through the “Do you want to allow…” learning curve again.
Yeah, i agree, nice review. I currently use the free Norton scanner from the Google Pack on some partitions and Comodo on others, but i’m seriously considering this new free AVG because of the interface and the explicit anti-spyware inclusion.
AVG 8 Free lacks a web scanner. avast! Home users get that for free. On the other hand: AVG looks way nicer than avast.
So would you say AVG uses less resources than Avast?
No news regarding that yet. It will probably be a little while until the detection labs get around to testing this version.
That’s kind of surprising. I would have thought that they would have carried settings like that over to the new version.
Having anti-spyware included with the free version is a nice touch, but that wasn’t such a concern of mine since I already run Windows Defender. But hey, you can’t complain when you get extra protection.
The web shield is definitely a nice touch, and I don’t think it was until a few months ago that Avast started including that in their Home version. A smart move on their behalf.
I liked it (tested it out at work), and I am going to update mine on the Windows machine when I get home. I definitely like the UI.
You are right. The new UI and overall behaviour is good. I use it on my xp desktop (but N360 on vista laptop), and it does the job with a low memory footprint. And it’s free. Difficult to complain!
Hmph, I don’t think it’s a good move to leave the anti-rootkit out considering that the previous standalone scanner is way outdated, and both AntVir and avast! detect them. It’s nice to see that, despite the huge download, the scanner is light.
I posted a review on my blog and fussed a bit about the fact that while AVG SafeSearch and AVG SafeSurf (and the toolbars) were nice features for some users, I certainly didn’t care for them, and that they were a pain to disable. AND that there wasn’t a global way to remove them in AVG.
An anonymous tipster pointed me to a AVG Free 8 FAQ that shows how to install AVG Free 8 without these features.
Except that you have to run the installer from the command line with some special arguments:
AVG Free FAQ’s #1338
[free.grisoft.com]
Quote:
How to install AVG without LinkScanner
If you wish to install AVG 8.0 Free Edition without the LinkScanner component, or uninstall this component from your program, please proceed as follows:
* Download the AVG 8.0 Free Edition installation package from our website.
* Run the installation with the parameters /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch. One way to achieve this is to:
o save the AVG Free installation file directly to disk C:\
o open menu Start -> Run
o type
c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
* The installation will be started, and AVG will be installed without the LinkScanner component.
Bit confusing for the non-geek, but it did work, even when followed on a system that already had AVG Free 8 installed.
Completely removed from all browsers and even the AVG application/component itself.
–Cheers!
You left out a very important feature of the AVG 8 Free Edition. After a trial period, the e-mail protection is disabled. You can only get this feature back if you upgrade to the full Internet protection version…for a fee. This is a marketing stratgy that most reviewers have overlooked in their enthusiasm for the free product.
The E-mail scanner is fully functional and will not expire after 30 days. That is only so in the Trial-Pro version.
From Michael on the AVG Team:
“Dear AVG Free Users…
Cmon – you know us better than that!
Cnet have obviously confused our free trail version with the AVG Free version.
NOTHING on your AVG 8.0 Free Edition will expire after 30 days!”
Here is the link to the AVG Free Forum where this issue was answered:
[forum.grisoft.cz]
I installed AVG 8.0 Friday afternoon and for the first hour or so everything seemed to be working fine.
(Let me interrupt here to say that I’m running XP Pro/SP3 and Firefox 2.0.0.14 with about 30 extensions.)
Then, about a third of my FF extensions stopped working. I rebooted FF and all but two or three of my extensions stopped. Being a glutton for punishment, I shut down FF and rebooted my computer.
It never came back. Instead I got a blue screen and I’ve been working away trying to get things restarted again practically nonstop since then — including talking for hours to Microsoft help, trying a re-install of XP (it didn’t reinstall), and trying a clean install of Vista (it didn’t install.)
I’ve also run my Dell diagnostics twice and it reports that everything about my machine is working properly — except the operating system and all of the software apparently.
I have no idea if the problem is AVG 8 or the newly-installed SP3 or some combination of the two or something else entirely.
Whatever it is, I’m not very happy.
Ted
That’s a bummer. Maybe it is XP SP3
Yesterday I installed AVG Free 8 on a Vista SP1 and a Windows XP Pro SP2 systems and they have both been running fine – I have the latest Firefox on both with many extensions (about 20 plus each) and the extensions seem to be working fine. No BSOD.
I ran automatic full system scans with AVG Free 8 on both with no problems.
Is your SP3 version for XP the full and final version?
Upgraded to AVG 8.0 from AVG 7.5 the interface is much better not sure about the real time protection, but after downloading some test viruses and scanning them with AVG 8.0 it picked up all of them so seems to be quite effective.
I disabled the linkscanner extension in firefox and IE7 because it didn’t work and McAfee SiteAdvisor is much better.
I was a little bummed that it was left out as well, but I guess that would be one of the big reasons to pay for the software. They have to have some incentives there.
Thanks for the instructions! I didn’t actually think about needing to remove the LinkScanner since it could be disabled in the settings. But I could see how some people wouldn’t want it at all on their machines.
That is really crazy! I’m guessing that it is a combination of having SP3 and AVG. Maybe they hadn’t tested it on the release candidate yet before pushing it out.
I ran the system scan on Vista SP1 without any issues. I’m guessing it is an incompatibility with XP SP3 as you mentioned.
In general I don’t use these services. Good to konw that you think SiteAdvisor is better. I haven’t tried that out in quite some time.
Well, the first thing AVG8 did after the ‘upgrade’ was delete all the email out of my inbox, so I can’t say I’m happy with it at all…
I tested the beta version. It was ok but it used sooooooo much resources. The thing I was disappointed in was the support. I understand it was a beta version but I couldn’t uninstall that damn thing and wrote their support about 10 times(literally) and not ONE single response from them.
I’m not currently impressed with AVG Free 8.0. First of all, it takes up an enormous amount of memory from my computer, thus slowing most of my processes. My other concern is that its AVG Security Toolbar is not compatible with Firefox 3.0.