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Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: hegedusa on April 03, 2008, 12:51:13 AM

Title: Avast Vs Norton etc.
Post by: hegedusa on April 03, 2008, 12:51:13 AM

My company does home and small business PC support and we end up replacing most antivirus setups with Avast (home users get the avast home edition - sometimes pro - and business users we install the pro). Most of the time it's an obvious decision:

• Their Norton/mcafee has run out as it was a trial, or they just didn't realise
• Their Norton/mcafee was slowing down the machine so much it was unusable
• Their existing AV was malfunctioning (blocking websites, email, filesharing etc.)

I often list reasons to change (apart from the above) such as Avast having a much smaller memory footprint, Avast not being encumbered by pointless firewalls, actually being able to remove viruses (yes, I've actually seen Norton just say that a virus was found, and didn't offer any options, and didn't even say "can't delete" - I installed Avast and within 5 seconds of bootup it wiped 5 viruses), and better ability to detect spyware (for example Avast most of the time detects FunWebProducts products as adware/spyware, but Norton never does).

I even had to replace kaspersky the other day because it had started to go wrong and block scripts for no reason!

Our customers never have any problems with Avast, apart from after a year, not knowing how to request a new key.

If there's anyone knowledgeable about the inner workings of antiviruses, are there any other really good reasons that I should be recommending Avast as a superior product to Norton/mcafee etc?

Title: Re: Avast Vs Norton etc.
Post by: Lisandro on April 03, 2008, 02:55:52 AM

It will be easy for us to list a lot of advantages:

1. There is a home version for free.
2. It's the most configurable antivirus round (compared with Norton and McAfee, for instance).
3. Antispyware and antirootkit detection and cleaning.
4. Boot time scanning.
5. WebShield that blocks the infection even before any file is saved in the computer.
6. Excellent and fast support.

I'll let other advantages for other users to participate here ;D