Avg 8.0 - New

I quite regually get abuse from my beloved readers accusing me of fibbing about how free AVG free is when it starts asking them for money. However I do quite enjoy these emails as they alwasy indicate a new version of my favourite free download has been released.

Now, I must admit that it is true that whenever a new version of AVG is released and an old version is discontinued, they do try and push users down the route of buying the more advanced package. I don't blame them for this as everybody needs to make money, however those that actually bother reading the message will see that there is still a free option available. It is this version, AVG 8, which I will be reviewing today.

I have always pitched AVG as being the anti-virus checker that my readers should be using and amazingly the best thing about this application ISN'T the fact that it's free - In actual fact there are plenty of reasons that you would want to use AVG even if you had to pay for it.

My favourite feature of the application is its non intrusive nature; it silently gets on with it - In my opinion there is nothing worse than a virus checker that gets you too involved and prevents you from getting along with the job in hand. Everything is done in the background so you want have to be involved if you rather understandably don't want to be; it will update itself and even perform full system scans without you ever realising and then, if it finds a virus it will efficiently dispose of it.

Install and forget is a nice philosophy and beats gigantic boated pieces of software such as Norton Internet Security which prompt you every 15 seconds about problems that you wish it would just work out for itself; I've never understood a virus scanner which will actually ask me if I want to remove a virus it has found. In my eyes this is a stupid question - why would I voluntarily keep something that is liable to wipe my hard drive and provide me with months of extra unpaid work?

Version 8 improves the background scanning from previous AVG incarnations and gives new and quite somewhat past due Spyware protection, together with a helpful LinkScanner feature. The concluding is a new component which gives a quick graphical assessment of a sites perceived safety before you visit it when you search in an engine such as Google. It works by taking the findings of those that use the AVG toolbar by warning you via a small graphical link if a site that appears in your search results is likely to be malicious.

Updates are provided for free for the duration of the application and of course all the normal features like e-mail scanning and resident shield are provided and switched on by default.

With regards to installing, the program is a 45.6mb download which can be obtained by visiting http://free.grisoft.com - It is worrying to see such the size has growth significantly from AVG 7.5's 16mb footprint but this is still much smaller than many other virus checkers on the market. After advice given to me by our resident techie who resides upstairs from Refresh at Switch Computer Support, I would recommend removing AVG 7 before installing version 8 as by all accounts the installation program does sometimes simply 'forget' to remove the old version first which can cause problems.