On-demand comparative August 2008
- Advanced+ for our lovely software
- Many false positives
Go go avast!
Great job, Avast. Avast has gone from a pretty good application to one of the best in detection rates. I hope the FP can be reduced, but I am very pleased to see the great strides in detection.
Avast has always been my fall back AV, but now is good enough to be the primary.
Is there a difference in detection between the free and paid edition? It has been awhile since I looked at it.
Again, Great work Avast team.
Regards,
Jerry
Well done avast
Avg rather poor and I would rather have a few false positives than a baddy get past :
Pat on the Back to all at Avast ;D
How good will Avast 5 be
Looking forward to it
jay
unlike some there is no difference in detection rate
shows that in conjunction with most any real time aniti malware app avast rocks
and Free for home use
It appears that the FP rate is already being addressed
It would be helpful to determine which app is the best fit with avast
Spybot t-timer
Windows Defender
SpywareDoctor free from google pack
Spyware Terminator (without Clam AV and toolbar)
BO Clean
some of the choice depends on os and how many resources are available
No, Pro and Home is using the same engine.
Indeed very impressive score. False positives aren’t all that problematic, at least not for me.
Great job ALWIL team!
Very good work, that elusive Advanced+ category achieved at last.
FPs, whilst they might well be a pain, they shouldn’t be that much of a problem if people get out of the delete (nuclear) as a first action.
Thanks, and keep it up Avast.
Regards,
Jerry
Good result Avast! Nice work and keep striving, as we all do, to improve upon an already very good performance. Looking forward to see the results of the resident detection tests later this year.
Curious question: It seems like these tests are all well and good and tell us which AV programs do a really poor job and do a really good job at on demand virus detection. But, that’s in a labatory setting. What’s the real world difference between an AV program that scored 99.x% and one that scores 97.x% in its on-demand scanning detection? Is there really any real world difference between the one or two that scored the highest and the one or two that scored in the top 5? In otherwords, does that 2 or 3 percentage point difference make a difference in the real world?
Well this test I would say is closer the the real world that say the VB100 which is looking only at in the wild samples.
You just have to look at the virus/malware Set A total of 1,190,818 which is a lot of samples, add to that Set B another 1,096,202, giving a total of over 2.3 million. I would say that is a very broad sample set.
How close that is to real world is anyone’s guess.
Congratulations… keep your good work improving detection, we acknowledge the effort.
Why no one talk about VERY bad on-demand scan speed?
- for detection
- for FP-s
- for scan speed…
overally good job, because Alwil is improving…
For me it’s not “VERY bad”. I can live with avasts speed, and I don’t have a bus to catch 
Of course I would like that avast gets faster, but I don’t think it’s speed is a problem, at least not for me.
It’s getting it’s job done…after awhile…and thats ok for me!
And better slow with good protection, than fast with low protection ;D
I give really not that importance to it if we can have a non-resource hog resident provider protecting continuously in background.
Besides, the fortunate ones could schedule scanning at night time
I have to agree with Bluesman, for me the scan isn’t slow at all, especially on this new system. Even on my old system it wasn’t slow (but I don’t have huge amounts of data). I have a number of other on-demand scanners (anti-spyware). SAS is much slower than avast and it doesn’t scan anywhere near the same number of files. Whilst avast doesn’t do a specific registry scan that part of SAS doesn’t take long, but the avast scan also does an anti-rootkit scan (which is very quick) as part of the scan.
I also set it at avast on-demand scans to Standard sensitivity and you don’t say what scan speed you use. In the test avast starts on the default setting of Standard, but upon first detection it automatically bumps that up to Thorough, which would slow the scan considerably.
I generally don’t hang around watching a scan, I much prefer to go off and get a coffee, etc. so speed isn’t an absolute essential, but avast isn’t slow by any standard. However when comparing speed you have to ensure you are comparing apples with apples or the comparison is worthless.
There is also the work around for scheduled scans in the home version if you want to fire it and go to bed.
Kudos to Avast…job well done, along with Avira, this is the only other AV I use. Don’t worry about FPs, Avira initially had the same issues but look at them now, top notch and for years. Avast is getting closer so its a step in the right direction for sure. I would rather have FPs and be protected than have none and live with a false sense of security. Well done team Alwil and thanks again for keeping this quality offering free for those who are unable to buy a good AV. Your generosity is paying off as your product is on its way go becoming number one.
I agree ! Many thanks for Alwil Team
well, the results are really not bad - the fourth place (in detection) is quiet good!
(but with many FPs!..)
although, great work!
Yes, I agree to that!
Did anyone notice that AV-Comparatives commented about the high number of false positives in this round of tests and indicated that future scores/awards/rankings might take into account the number of false positives. Thus, in this round, those with higher numbers of false positives might have scored lower overall than they did this time.