This AVG antivirus review is based on our own experiences with AVG Antivirus.

I have personally made a point of evaluating around 50 different Antivirus products over the last 5 years, trying each for around 6 months checking everything from updates, reliability in terms of actually detecting and removing viruses, and how much overhead the software needs to run.

AVG is one of the very few products that I have kept installed and have been using and recommending on friends and families computers for a few years now, initially I started with AVG free antivirus before upgrading to one of the full versions.

Virus’s and Spyware

There really is no reason today why an antivirus package should only offer virus protection, if I see one that does not also offer antispyware it’s not for me, after all having separate antivirus and antispyware applications means twice the overheads, twice the updates and in many cases twice the cost.

To me a good antivirus package should also be able to detect and remove spyware as well as viruses and AVG free antivirus or the paid versions both offer this.

System Overheads

An antivirus package should be unobtrusive, small in terms of the system resources it uses, currently AVG on my computer is using 35mb which is very good for such a comprehensive piece of software, other so called complete antivirus packages weigh in at over 130mb.

Scanning Abilities

There is a simple saying, if your antivirus or antispyware software never finds anything change it quickly. If you browse the web send or receive emails at some stage your computer will be subjected to something nasty trying to get onto your computer, so expect your chosen software to find something every so often even if it’s only tracking cookies, as a double backup I also run an online scan once a week using something such as Panda to double check nothing has slipped through the net, and so far AVG has been very good.

Reliability

Software problems do happen and when they do it’s nice to be able to fix the issue quickly rather than messing around losing lots of your valuable time.

During the time I have used and recommended AVG we have encountered two issues, the first of these involved Windows not recognizing that AVG was installed and would not monitor it, and kept flagging up a message advising no antivirus was installed, the second issue involved not being able to update AVG, both of these issues were resolved simply by going to the support section of the applications uninstall and selecting the repair option which was literally a 30 second fix that I was able to talk both clients through in about the same time.

Cost

Especially today the cost of software has never been more important to us, even if it is crucial software such as antivirus or antispyware.

With AVG they offer several versions these include

• AVG free antivirus
• AVG antivirus 9.0
• AVG internet security 9.0

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All of them offer Antispyware in addition to the Antivirus which is a nice feature, and you can keep using the free version as long as you wish, and upgrade to one of the full versions at any time which is great as you can even evaluate the full versions for around 30 days which offers more than adequate time to get the feel for it.

Please note all the comments listed here in our AVG antivirus review article are our own which we have derived from actually using AVG ourselves.

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