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One month after the introducting of Windows 95 in August 1995, I entered the Internet for the first time. After some try-outs I choose for Alwil avast! antivirus Home and I stick to that choice till now. As I started on a Pentium 166 with 64 Mb Ram and a HD of 10 Gb with Windows 95, nowadays I can use a P4 3,2, 512 Mb Ram, 120 Gb HD machine with Windows XP Professional SP2. But all those years avast! served me well, silent, in the background and only the emerging of little blue squares, to notify me of the installation of an update, remind me of his existence.

Once downloaded, the installation is swift and neat. For starters, the program downloads the neccessary updates, be it for the program itself, or for the virus-library. The tuning of the settings for real-time protection are easy to perform. They are Instant Messaging, Outlook/Exchange, Internet Mail, Network Shield, P2p Shield, Standard Shield and Web Shield. If, despite all measurements taken, there should slip a virus into your system, make sure you did configure a Virus Recovery Database, this will assist you in repairing the infected file(s). Of course, this VRDB can update itself, if you say so.

And of course again, from time to time one has to perform a virus scan. With a nice GUI (more skins to download) the performing of the scan is silent and in the background. There are three levels to choose from, as there are also in the real-time protection modes: low, medium and high, (or custum) so to speek. For the scans there are really six levels, as there is a choice for archives optin/optout.

In almost ten years avast! did the job for me, I never got a virus and only when I wanted to start a download from some risky websites, avast! gave me the alarm, plus notification of the kind of virus I was about to let in. At least I knew then my protection was in function.

I never had a question about the performing of the program, but should I have: there is a user-friendly Alwil Webforum with avast1 subforums to rely on. The Alwil boys and girls do not maintain such a huge promotion machine, but in my opion, they better should.

Added: April 12th 2006

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NOTE: Product reviews are independently written by our members and do not necessarily express the opinions or views of CastleCops.