I have been viewing comments on this Forum for quite a while now and have formed an opinion, this being open to debate by other members. My conclusion is, allowing for the fact that Avast 5 beta staff initally apparently worked alongside Microsoft in development of their tandem products, Avast 5 and MSE, MSE is by far the best free product. On installing it on my W7 Ultimate machine I have found that it runs totally in the background with minimal cpu usage and no false positives at all.
In a previous post I stated that I was finally satisfied with the latest build of Avast 5 and that my machine was working normally. Since then that latest Avast 5 creation has reverted to the usual Internet throttling problems
In conclusion guys, hard as it might be to accept, Avast 5 really is INFERIOR to the much loved Avast 4 and the latest MSE offering IMHO
I would appreciate this comment being listed so that balanced replies are forthcoming
If that is your thought then use MSE, but remember this is a support forum and you generally only get people here who are experiencing problems and the very greatest majority aren’t suffering this problem.
However, if you are one of the people suffering this problem then it is a very great problem and it doesn’t matter how many aren’t having any problems like myself.
But you can’t really compare the two as they are quite different.
So the choice really is yours based on your perceived view or personal experience and what others say is really immaterial.
Thanks for the reply DavidR, it’s appreciated. The reason I compared Avast 5 to MSE was that I had read on this Forum that they were working together at some point. Anyway, as you say,
" So the choice really is yours based on your perceived view or personal experience and what others say is really immaterial "
I run Avast! 5 on my two Vista computers and my wife runs MSE on her W7x64 computers. I have also used MSE, by itself and even with Avast! fully operational, with no issues there either. Both give good protection; difference is how much interaction you want. My wife prefers “install and forget”; I prefer more interaction/control and earlier detection using the shields. The vast majority of avast! 5 users simply have no problems; there are also unsolved issues that do affect some significant number of users-most look like contentions that haven’t been found yet. And Avast! 5 functionality and GUI are far superior to 4.x (which I used for nearly 5 years) unless you fall into one of the unfortunate problem groups. So if you still have the Avast! itch, check back when 5.1 comes around and Alwil has had a little more time to chase down the things that didn’t show up in beta testing or get solved in early operations. I think Alwil still needs a bit more time to be able to look at more dumps and debug captures. The latest AV Comparatives gives Avast! a bit of an edge in AV performance, but MSE, Avast! 5, Avira run neck and neck in most of the polls I have seen.
Thanks for the replies guys. As I have said on other posts, I was a loyal Avast 4 user for several years and enjoyed the audio alerts that a virus had been found, virus updates, etc. I don’t remember any FP’s with that version, although I did install it after the beta’s were finished. My nagging problems with the latest Avast 5 version is that there still is a problem of internet download speeds being restricted. I just don’t understand why MSE gives me no problems at all in this respect, but I am still having problems with Avast 5, given that the Avast guys worked together with MSE
That’s the point I am making buddy. The extra features of the Web Shields are what is giving me my Internet problems. In a nutshell, are the extra Shields worth the hassle ? MSE works fine without these ’ Shields ’ and I personally can’t understand why Avast 5 ! developers have included them, given all the hassle that they have caused, and continue to do so. In conclusion, is it worth all the bad feedback and problems with Avast 5 just to include " these extra features " ?
this was particularly referred to when Avast 5 was at beta stage, and there was no reliable vps update yet (not regularly + lots of FPs). MSE was then a good temporary solution to keep an updated resident protection (although MSE didn’t update automatically on many systems during the first months ). Anyway, my opinion is that MSE is an AV like any other one, and as such can conflict with another AV like Avast if both run as resident at the same time. No way for me me
). Anyway, my opinion is that MSE is an AV like any other one, and as such can conflict with another AV like Avast if both run as resident at the same time. No way for me me 