Avast Antivirus Real Time protection - Review

Written by the same firm that offers AVG Anti-Virus Software, Avast is like turning up the volume on your iPod to the full 80 watts per channel in a four-channel system so that you can literally blast any nasty stuff back to where it belongs.

If this were a motorcycle or racing track, you would find that Avast would probably be the pole sitter (starting car) and would lead the race through out as it passes trojans, links, bots, link kits and rootkits as if they weren't even there.

In their way, you have a system that performs much better and is much cleaner. In fact, the level of clean is amazing. One of the key features of the Avast software, another piece of thinking or "heuristic" software from AVG is its level of anticipation. Every time you are installing a software, it pokes around within the software package itself to see if the software may be bugged and if it is, it offers you two options, one let it go through - if you already used the software and know what it is there's no reason why not - but if it is new software, you can safely let it kill the intruder and you can find another piece of software to use.

Believe us when we say that if you found one piece of software to install, we mean that you will find that piece again or something similar with more features and with better protection, as well. Indeed, if it isn't well protected, then you won't be able to install it. This could sound frustrating and it could be over the long haul, but it is better to have a working PC that is virus and trojan-free than one that is so loaded with malware and other nasties (other names for trojans and things) that your system will slow to a crawl and other systems will refuse your requests to connect.

Using a special engine, Avast can look inside archived software that whose files may be sent in ARJ, ZIP and MIME formats, as well as MAPI (a Microsoft Outlook package) and other forms compressed file formats such as DBX, RAR, TAR, GZIP, CAB, BZIP2, ZOO, ACE, ARC, LHA/LHX, TNEF, CPIO, CHM, RPM, ISO, 7ZIP and SIS.

There is also support for packages that create executable compressed files. Names that come to mind include PKLite, Diet and UPX, among others. From the list, you can see Avast is at the top of its game and aims to stay there.

One feature you are sure to like is Avast's ability to provide you real-time protection for the your operating system and its kernel code. Avast's code looks at what is going on inside the operating system and if it does agree with that should be there, it won't any software through that will infect the root of your system.

One of the ways that this can happen, believe it or not is through a very innocent-looking email. All it takes is opening the email and without Avast in the background, your system will be in trouble.

And, in a recent development, the bad guys have figured out how to intercept and use IM (instant Messaging) code to spread their viruses, but the programming team at Avast is on top of this one, too, as it keeps your system clean and IM's free of nasty software.

Avast is also offered with "free" version that works quite well.