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.

What’s New in the Latest Windows 10 Insider Preview

Arguably the biggest update is Cortana. Microsoft continues to expand on what Cortana can do, clearly trying to make it the most powerful assistant in an increasingly growing pool of competition (Siri, Google Now, Alexa, and the whole gang). This time around, Cortana comes to the Windows 10 lock screen, so you can invoke her at any time. And, she can push stuff to and from your mobile device, including notifications and text messages. (And remember, sinceCortana is available on Android too, that doesn’t mean you need a Windows Phone to take advantage.)

More interestingly, though, Cortana can parse even more information about stuff it thinks you might need. For example, the on-stage demo showed us that Cortana can respond to things like “Send Chuck the PowerPoint I worked on last night”, or “What toy store did I visit at Build last year?” That’s pretty crazy. Of course, if you’re more privacy-conscious, that’s crazy in all the wrong ways–but it’s a pretty tempting set of features.

Cortana can also make proactive suggestions for you. If you receive email confirmation of flight details, it’ll add them to your calendar. If you promised Chuck you’d send him that PowerPoint in an email, Cortana will know, and remind you to fulfill that commitment later on.

Furthermore, if you add an appointment to your calendar, it’ll know if that appointment overlaps with another, and ask you if you want to re-schedule one of the overlapping events. Or, if you have a meeting during lunch it’ll ask if you want to book a table, or make a to-go order, based on the apps you have available. In short, Cortana is getting more proactive, so you don’t have to be on top of your own stuff–and isn’t that what having an assistant is all about?

Windows 10 Interacts with Your Android Phone (or Windows Phone)

This isn’t finished in the Insider Preview yet, but after the Build keynote, Microsoft also announced that Cortana will now integrate with the Cortana application on your Android or Windows smartphone. You’ll just need to install the Cortana Android app and sign in with the same Microsoft account on both devices. iPhone users are out of luck, as iOS is too locked down for Microsoft to integrate with it as deeply. As of build 14328, this should be working between Windows 10 PCs and Windows Mobile 10 phones running the latest builds. It now works between Android phones and Windows 10 PCs, too–just be sure you have the latest Cortana app installed from Google Play.

How to Turn Off the Character Popups on the iOS 9 Keyboard

When you tap a key on the iOS keyboard, it will “pop up” so you know what key you’re pressing. This preview has long been a feature that you had to live with whether you liked it or not, but in iOS 9, you can disable it.

To begin, tap “Settings” on the Home screen.

Tap “General” on the Settings screen.

On the “General” screen, tap “Keyboard”.

In the “All Keyboards” section, tap the “Character Preview” slider button so it turns white instead of green.

Now you won’t see the character popups when you tap keys on the keyboard. The ability to turn off the character popups is also a security enhancement. With the “Character Preview” setting on, anyone who can see your screen while you’re typing can more easily see which keys your tapping. Turning off the setting will better mask your keystrokes.

Don’t Waste Time Optimizing Your SSD

SSDs Aren’t as Small or Fragile as They Used to Be

There are a lot of guides out there about optimizing your SSD, but we don’t recommend following most of them. Some of the advice is outdated, and some of it was never necessary.

Much of the advice on “optimizing” Windows for an SSD involves reducing the amount of writes to the SSD. That’s because each cell of flash memory on the drive only has a limited number of writes before it can’t be written to anymore. Guides assert that you should try to avoid unnecessary wear on the SSD by minimizing the amount of writes.

But worries about SSD wear are overblown. Tech Report ran an 18-month-long stress test where they wrote as much data to SSDs as possible to see when they failed. Here’s what they found:

“Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.”

Even at 700TB, the lowest failure threshold, you could write 100 GB a day to the drive every single day for over 19 years before the drive failed. At 2 PB, you could write 100 GB a day to the drive every single day for over 54 years before the drive failed. It’s unlikely you’ll write that much data to the drive every single day. You’ll probably be done with the drive well before then. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ll die before your SSD dies of wear. Everything wears down, and SSDs are no exception–but they don’t wear down so quickly that we need to worry about it.

You still need to perform regular backups of your important files, as SSDs could fail for other reasons aside from wear. And for extremely heavy use–for example, database servers–an SSD might not be up to snuff. But tweaking Windows to write a bit less to the drive won’t make an appreciable difference.

Other guides advise you to reduce the amount of files you store on the SSD to save space. That’s because SSDs may slow down as you fill them up, just like any other drive–but this was more helpful when SSDs were tiny. Modern SSDs are larger and less expensive, so you shouldn’t have to disable important system functions (like hibernation) to stay within these limits.

Windows Already Performs the Necessary Optimizations For You

There are some important optimizations, but Windows performs them all automatically. If you used an SSD with Windows XP or Vista, you needed to manually enable TRIM, which ensures your SSD can clean up deleted files and stay speedy. However, ever since Windows 7, Windows has automatically enabled TRIM for any drive it detects as solid-state.

The same goes for disk defragmentation. Performing a typical defragmentation operation on an SSD isn’t a good idea–even if wear isn’t a concern, attempting to move all that data around won’t speed up file access times like it will on a mechanical drive. But Windows already knows this, too: modern versions of Windows will detect that SSD and will turn off defragging. In fact, modern versions of Windows won’t even let you attempt to defragment an SSD.

On Windows 8 and 10, the “Optimize Drives” application will attempt to optimize your SSDs even further. Windows will send the “retrim” command on the schedule you configure. This forces the SSD to actually delete data that should have been deleted when TRIM commands were originally sent. Windows 8 and 10 will also perform an SSD-optimized type of defragmentation about once a month. Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman offers more details on his blog.

Windows 8 and 10 also automatically disable the SuperFetch service for speedy solid-state drives. Leave SuperFetch “on” in Windows 10 and it will automatically enable itself for slower mechanical drives and disable itself for fast SSDs. You don’t need to tweak this by hand–Windows 10 just does the right thing. Windows 7 will disable SuperFetch system-wide if you have a fast enough SSD. Either way, SuperFetch is disabled automatically.

Windows Update automatically updates your hardware drivers–whether or not you want it to–so you shouldn’t need to dig up new driver versions from your motherboard manufacturer’s website to go looking for performance improvements.