Updates to stand-alone antivirus tools generally aren't anything to get excited about. The interface might have changed color, or maybe relocated a few buttons, and of course you'll get the standard promises about improved accuracy, or better performance, but otherwise it's often business as usual.
Avast! Free Antivirus 6.0 is an exception, though, thanks to a host of interesting and highly visible new features: automatic sandboxing, website reputation reporting, improved real-time protection, and many more. And so the end result is a package that looks rather more like a security suite than a simple antivirus engine. But is the new functionality really as effective as it looks? We put the program through some real-life tests in an effort to find out.
First impressions
Installation was reasonably straightforward, with no complex options to worry about. All the new features mean there's a greater than usual chance that Avast will conflict with some other tool you've installed, of course. But if, say, you already have the Web of Trust add-on installed, and don't want Avast's similar offering, then a click on the Custom Install option will allow you to disable it, and any other features you may not require.
Avast doesn't force you to reboot after the installation, and instead launches a "Quick Scan" to hunt for malware. It wasn't actually that quick on our test PC, though, taking some 25 minutes to complete. And for some reason our system remained largely unresponsive for all of that time, so for instance we would try to launch a program and it wouldn't appear for some 90 seconds: very odd.
Fortunately this was only a temporary issue, and once we left the scan to run to completion, and rebooted, the problem went away entirely. Future scans required little in the way of system resources -- maybe 5-percent CPU utilization or less, around 28MB RAM (private working set) -- and we were able to freely use other programs as the scans were running, without seeing any performance degradation.
New features
One of the headline new features in Avast 6 is the AutoSandbox, which automatically runs anything Avast finds suspicious inside a virtual environment. Any changes the program might then make will apply only to the sandbox, not your PC, so keeping you safe from many malware types.
Does it work? Sandboxing is a complex technology, and it takes a great deal of work to figure out how thorough a particular implementation might be, but our first impressions are positive. Avast didn't sandbox any of our regular, trusted programs, but when we tried a couple of malware samples it jumped in to protect us from both: a very good start. (Although it's a pity that you can't decide to launch a program in the sandbox yourself -- only Avast gets to make that decision.)
Another new addition is WebRep, a browser plug-in that displays reputation ratings for the site you're currently viewing, and your web search results. This is based in part on voting by other Avast users, which, as the feature is very new, probably explains why it's not too informative so far (we found most sites got "good" scores or no ratings at all).
Avast is a popular package with more than 120 million active users, though, so if only some of them decide to get involved then WebRep could quickly become a more useful feature. To Internet Explorer and Firefox users, anyway: there's no support for other browsers yet, although apparently a Chrome extension is coming soon.
Elsewhere, Avast provides real-time protection through eight shields. These check the files you access; your incoming and outgoing emails; your web browsing (http), P2P and instant messaging traffic, and network activity. The Behavior Shield alerts you to programs engaged in malware-like activities, while the Script Shield (previously only available in the paid version) checks the scripts you execute for signs of infection. Taken together these provide good all-round protection out of the box, but most shields also have many tweaks and configuration options available to customize them further, if that's necessary for your system.
And the package is completed with a host of smaller but still worthwhile improvements everywhere you look, from a new desktop gadget that displays your security status, to better control over boot-time scans, and a "restore factory defaults" option that assists troubleshooting by restoring your initial settings.
Verdict: We're not sure how valuable WebRep will be, but otherwise Avast! Free Antivirus 6.0 is a positive step forward, adding plenty of useful features yet still consuming very few system resources. If you're currently in the market for a stand-alone antivirus tool then Avast remains one of the best and most versatile options around.
We Like: Clean interface, effective sandbox, lightweight, lots of real-time protection features, very configurable.
We Don't Like: Scanning speeds a little below average, WebRep currently not too useful and only works with IE/ Firefox.
Manufacturer: AVAST Software
MSRP: Free
Platforms: Windows XP SP2/ Windows Vista (32/ 64-bit)/ Windows 7 (32/ 64-bit)
Requirements: 300MB free hard drive space
