AVG Antivirus test

The program's dark-hued main window features five large panels representing five security areas: Computer, Web, Identity, Email, and Firewall. Each panel includes a colored circle that's proportionally colored to reflect how complete your protection is, and each circle changes from green to red if there's a problem.

AVG really does want you to try the pro edition. During installation, you get a choice of proceeding to install AVG free or starting a 30-day trial of pro. It's a bit tricky; the only way to proceed with the free edition is to back up a step and select Custom Install. And of course the ad panel across the bottom exhorts you to upgrade.

Privacy Brouhaha
AVG made the news recently with reports that its new privacy policy allowed the company to sell your browsing and search history. An article in Wired made some strong statements, among them that this policy placed AVG squarely in the category of spyware.

I perused the actual privacy policy, along with privacy policies of a number of other sites, and concluded that AVG's policy is completely normal for the industry. Publishers of free antivirus software must have some way to make money, but it totally can't involve selling personal data. That would be corporate suicide. The scariest privacy policy I read belonged to Wired itself.

Good Lab Results 
AVG participates in testing with all of the most-innovative labs that I follow, and does well. It has also appeared in all of the last 12 tests by Virus Bulletin, and received VB100 certification in 11 of those tests.

Of the three testing criteria used by AV-Test Institute, protection against malware is the most important. AVG defeated 100 percent of the malware samples used in this test, earning 6 of 6 possible points. It also took 6 points for usability, meaning it exhibited almost no false positives. The only thing keeping it from achieving a perfect 18 points the way Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2016 did was a poor showing in the performance test.

 In a different performance test by AV-Comparatives, AVG rated Advanced+, the top rating. It also earned Advanced+ in the dynamic real-world protection test, and in a test specifically measuring how thoroughly products remove malware they detect. It would have managed Advanced in both static file detection tests by this lab, but false positives knocked one score down to Standard.

The months-long real-world test performed by Dennis Technology Labs is labor-intensive enough that this lab only includes about 10 products. Like Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2016) and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security 2016, AVG earned AAA certification, the best rating.

While AVG doesn't have the across-the-board top scores that Bitdefender and Kaspersky boast, it's definitely up there with the best free products.

Speedy ScanWhen you click the Scan now button on the main window, you get several choices. You can manage scheduled scans, run a scan of the whole computer, scan a specific folder, or run a rootkit scan. That last one had me worried the first time I saw it. Would users have to run a rootkit scan and a full scan? Don't worry; the full scan includes rootkits.

I timed a full scan on my standard clean test system and found it took 27 minutes. That's pretty good, given that the current average is 34 minutes. During the initial scan, AVG notes files that are known to be safe and hence don't require scanning as long as they don't change. A repeat scan with AVG completed in barely a minute.

Effective Malware BlockingAVG put on a good show in my hands-on malware-blocking test. When I opened the folder containing my malware samples, it leapt in to the fray, knocking out one sample after another. Within a few minutes, 86 percent of the samples were gone.

My malicious URL blocking test, on the other hand, is always current. Using a data feed supplied by MRG-Effitas, I challenge each antivirus with the very newest malware-hosting URLs. For each URL that doesn't result in an error message, I note whether the antivirus prevented the browser from even visiting the URL, eliminated the payload during or immediately after download, or ignored the threat.