In my humble opinion, the only real way to test and review anti-virus programs is to chuck viruses and Trojans at them. Here is a review that has done just that.
The first section of the review is a summary and critique of the Virus Bulletin results.
The second part gives the results of a test in which files infected with viruses, worms and Trojans were used to test a number of anti-virus products.
Again in my humble opinion, the results for avast! were good.
avast! was described as “popular” and one of the “best free products.”
The review also said “These results show that the best commercial AV products do indeed out-perform the best free products but the margin is not huge.”
The detection rate for avast! was 82%, by the way. The best result was 90%.
If your using KAZZA P2P make sure you use NOD32 AV :D, good thing is i don’t use KAZZA (Whew), so ill use the best AV in the world for accross general terms (Avast!!).
If you're using KAZAA P2P make sure you use NOD32 AV
The reviewer doesn’t actually say this. He says use a free anti-virus and a free anti-Trojan program together and you will have protection exceeding that of the best commercial products.
I think the idea of using Kazaa was to find some real life malware, the stuff that visitors to this forum are always trying to get rid of. Somehow the logic of ‘I don’t use Kazaa, so I’ll use avast!, the best anti-virus in the world’ eludes me.
To reiterate what the review did say: avast! free finds most malware, no anti-virus finds all malware, the difference between the best and avast! is very small, and you can more than make up the gap by using a free anti-Trojan scanner like Ewido.
For me, using (and recommending) avast! free, that’s very good news.
Somehow the logic of 'I don't use Kazaa, so I'll use avast!, the best anti-virus in the world' eludes me.
LOL, i was only joking ;), just poking a little fun at the review, mainly because the test wasn’t very well done, just throwing a few malware samplesat it that come from Kazza hardly shows how good an Anti-Virus product if, i mean come on, it said AVG had better detection rates then Avast!, this is clearly not true, and Avast can easily match the detection rates of Norton/NOD32 etc (not quite up to Kaspersky standard because it detects lots of Spyware/Adware as well).
I could go on, but its all been discussed before, so ill leave you with your opinons and me with mine
avast! free finds most malware, no anti-virus finds all malware, the difference between the best and avast! is very small, and you can more than make up the gap by using a free anti-Trojan scanner like Ewido.
Well yes this is because of double protection, one mainly for Viruses/Worms, and one mainly for Trojans
For me, using (and recommending) avast! free, that's very good news.
The only opinion I want to express here is that it’s perfectly legitimate for reviewers to test an anti-virus program by throwing malware samples at it.
(Well, I also believe avast! is a pretty fine product: that’s why I use it!)
Where we seem to differ is, I seem to be under the delusion that avast! is perhaps not the best anti-virus program in the world judging by some of these reviews (at least in terms of detection rates)!
By the way, what are the avast! team up to at the moment? Working on improving detection rates for version 5, I’ve read in a few places on this forum!
When version 5 comes out, I hope to be able to say avast! is amoung the best anti-viruses in the world, rather than amoung the good ones.
This review shows that the difference is not that big; my own experience shows that the avast! team is working hard to improve the product and my expectation is that reviews can only get better.
