open air review

AVG Internet Security 8.0 is the latest version of the complete home security package from the company that made a name for itself by offering powerful, free antivirus software to the masses. It’s a pretty comprehensive suite of tools designed to protect all areas of your system, with a particular emphasis on online threats.

During installation you can choose to enable the AVG Security Toolbar, which uses the LinkScanner component to allow for real-time protection against malicious Web pages and automatic downloads. You also have the option here to perform a software and definition update, and create a schedule for automatic scanning.

It’s a pretty fast process, and before long you’re taken to the main interface, where you can monitor the level of protection via a set of 12 icons covering areas such as anti-virus, anti-spyware and the firewall. You can turn each of these components on and off individually to customise your level of security, but strangely certain components such as anti-virus or anti-spam don’t appear to offer any customisation features, instead simply reporting whether the component is up to date.

In order to tweak your preferences in these more obscure areas you’ll need to trawl through an advanced settings menu, which isn’t particularly friendly and doesn’t really make the software any easier to use.

To enable the firewall you’ll need to run an initial wizard to generate a configuration file for your machine. This scans your computer to find out what applications should be allowed access to the Internet, so is a necessary process to prevent you from being bombarded with confirmation requests.

Again this is straightforward enough, but again you’ll find that you appear to get little control over how applications and components are managed. To change priorities or access levels you’ll need to go through another advanced menu, which, while offering a good degree of control and fine-tuning - including the ability to configure adapters, system and network services - isn’t particularly clear or as nice to use as the more traditional structure offered by most rivals.

Results of a full system scan were pretty good. Although most of the detected items were Internet cookies, it did pick up all of the malicious ‘test’ files we copied onto the system to try to trip it up. It’s worth noting here that AVG installs most of its components as separate processes, which, while a little frustrating from a clutter point of view, doesn’t actually slow your system down too badly. Processor usage rarely ventured beyond about 50 percent during a full scan, and only on occasion did we notice system slowdown when performing other tasks.

When you fire up a Web browser you’ll see the AVG Toolbar, which if enabled will scan each site returned by a search query for potentially malicious content and show a green tick to indicate that it’s safe to visit. Any sites you visit directly are also scanned before they’re loaded, so you get a good degree of protection here.

We were left with mixed feelings about AVG 8.0. On one hand it seems to want to appear nicely automated and easy for beginners, since many of the more advanced options are tucked away. On the other hand the list of individual security tools does seem rather verbose, and we weren’t particularly impressed by the way the interface is put together.

But performance does seem quite good, there’s a comprehensive range of security, and automatically monitoring your system or performing scans doesn’t appear to be too resource-hungry.

There’s little point reiterating the proliferation of online threats in the modern online world, so instead let’s look at the latest release of a popular remedy. GriSoft has, for many years, provided a free version of its popular anti-virus solution AVG, and it has done so again with the new 7.5 edition.

The free edition, as you’d expect, is a stripped-down version of the Professional version the company sells (and tries to upgrade you to), but the truth is it has enough functionality to serve the majority of home users.

Available, although not easy to find, from the main GriSoft site, once downloaded the software takes you through its simple installation. It also wants to check for the latest updates (and it’s wise to comply), and once in place, part of the program’s daily routine is to download a daily update. This is included in the free version too.

It then moves on to tackling a full system scan, which again it likes to do on a regular basis, and on our test systems (a Core 2-based laptop with a 120GB hard drive, and a Socket 939 Athlon 64 desktop with 80GB drive) the scan took between 25 and 45 minutes.

Available, although not easy to find, from the main GriSoft site, once downloaded the software takes you through its simple installation. It also wants to check for the latest updates (and it’s wise to comply), and once in place, part of the program’s daily routine is to download a daily update. This is included in the free version too.

It then moves on to tackling a full system scan, which again it likes to do on a regular basis, and on our test systems (a Core 2-based laptop with a 120GB hard drive, and a Socket 939 Athlon 64 desktop with 80GB drive) the scan took between 25 and 45 minutes.

It does have quite a system overhead, especially on single core machines, and it’s obvious when a scan is taking place. You can still word-process, browse and e-mail, but we struggled with anything much more demanding. The scan was accurate and correct in picking up problems, though, and we were content with the level of virus protection it offered over a month-long test.

Our only other niggle is that we would have preferred a summation screen that made it clear when problems had been discovered and when the system was clean. A screen is presented, but the information isn’t as transparent as it could be.

On-demand virus scanning isn’t the only tool in the program’s armoury, though, with a Resident Shield that scans files and documents on-the-fly, and a competent e-mail scanner that works with popular mail clients to check your mail on the way into your machine. Again there’s an overhead here, albeit a small one, as the program delays incoming post slightly while it runs its checks.

AVG Free 7.5 is happy to carry on doing its work without intervention, but there’s a friendly Control Center application that glues the constituent parts together. From here you can manually initiate updates and scans, rearrange the program’s schedules and disable parts of its work.

In all, it’s a competent security program (albeit missing some further security elements that would be of use to the standard system), which naturally offers excellent value for money. We’d be perfectly happy recommending it for use on a home system, although for PCs where more sensitive work is being done, it’s worth spending some money, especially given the modest price of the likes of F-Secure, or even the Professional Edition of AVG