PCAVG.RVW 20020510 Comparison Review Company and product: Company: U.S.A. Grisoft Inc. Address: 5001 Shooting Star Rd., Pollock Pines, CA 95726 Email: custsupport@grisoft.com Product: AVG AntiVirus (Free Edition, Professional, Server) Summary: Manual and resident scanning (with some email extension), change detection Cost: unknown Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good) "Friendliness" Installation 3 Ease of use 2 Help systems 1 Compatibility 3 Company Stability 2 Support 1 Documentation 1 Hardware required 3 Performance 3 Availability 3 Local Support 1 General Description: Multilayered protection, primarily manual and resident scanning Comparison of features and specifications User Friendliness Installation The program appears to be distributed primarily over the Internet, as downloadable files (as of this writing, approximately 5 megabytes for each of the three editions). Purchase of the product provides you with keys that can be used to install the system. The Free Edition installed the first time without problems. Ironically, the Professional Edition did not install correctly the first time, and had to be removed and re-installed. There is little or no instruction regarding installation, and therefore installation on an infected system may be problematic. Installation of the Free Edition was straightforward. I was pleased to note that it installed on an NT server without complaint. The installation process does prompt the user for the creation of a rescue disk: as noted, this may create problems if the system is already infected. An annoying install bug is that occasionally it will not allow you to browse drives other than the Windows installation drive for an installation directory. However, you can specify any drive you wish, and the program will install there. (Oddly, on one install it first wanted to browse my virus samples directory.) The Free Edition installs, by default, with a daily check for updated signatures, and a daily scan scheduled. Installation of the Free Edition requires the user to fill out a form with contact information, and await an email message with a license code. (A similar process is involved for the licensed versions.) In one out of three tests this email and code did not arrive. Ease of use Presentation is reasonably clear, although all options may not be apparent to the user. Oddly, the Professional Edition has almost no interface at all, and finding features or functions can be very difficult. In the Free Edition, the manual scan cannot be directed to areas of concern, or to network drives. In addition, while the scan can be terminated by the user, upon either termination of the scan or interruption by the user, the "healing" (disinfection) process begins, and cannot be terminated. (This is not, presumably, a concern to most users, but was extremely annoying to me.) "Automatic Healing" can be turned off in the Professional Edition, and appears to be disabled by default. Another minor annoyance is that tests tend to stop and inform you each time they find a virus. They can be set to run continuously, without stopping, but only after they have found the first virus. (The option to do so is labelled, on the "Virus Detected!" box, but not really clear in terms of function.) The alert dialogue box, when the resident scanner has found an infection, appears to vary substantially for different versions of Windows. Sometimes it is a small box, other times it involves a full change of screen type. AVG has online updates that can be automatically scheduled. It also has provision for updating of the program with a separate download, as in the case where a number of computers have protection installed but only one has a connection to the Internet. However, this process does not appear to be completely straightforward, and involves downloads that are a significant fraction of the size of the full package. (This files would be much too large to distribute via floppy disk.) However, both in my own machine and another, the update function failed. AVG does not update itself as scheduled, and manually requesting an update does not succeed: the system says it cannot establish a connection even though I am online. Even after complaining to, and receiving a reply from, technical support I was not able to perform either an automatic or manual update, through the update system, nor was I able to get the manual update file, when downloaded and placed in the directory specified by technical support, to update the signatures. Help systems Online help is available, and explains the operations and options of the system well. Compatibility As noted, the Free Edition installed and operated without complaint on an NT Server machine. The program demonstrates an odd incompatibility in that the resident scanner will interfere with a manual scanning run by a product from another vendor. Files are inaccessible due to being locked and "in use" by the AVG resident scanner. Company Stability Unknown, but I note a number of messages that I am receiving carry an annotation stating that they are verified by AVG to be free of viruses. (There is a function for scanning incoming email, but it only works with Microsoft Outlook.) Company Support An automated support system asks for a description of the problem, and then attempts to send it as an email message. It attempts to use Microsoft Outlook, regardless of the email agent in use on the computer. Extensive programming is involved: on my test system it failed. The email address to use to contact the company is buried in the Help|Program Info menu. As noted, the one help request that I made to the company was not resolved. The replies that I got back mentioned server overload and workarounds. However, the overload never did seem to clear, and the very labour intensive workaround did not, in fact, solve the problem. Documentation Limited to the online help system. There is a provision for "Detailed Info" on viruses that are detected. However, This material appears to be cribbed from a variety of sources, is not always grammatical (or even readable, in some cases), and is woefully incomplete in most cases. System Requirements None stated. Performance Manual scanning was slower than other packages tested, but not unduly so, and there is somewhat less interference in terms of resource (CPU) exhaustion than with some faster scanners. Detection was better than for some scanners, identifying some infections in archive files. However, the detection of archived materials was not consistent: a number of infections in archives were missed. At least one sample of the common PrettyPark virus was missed. Resident scanning initially appeared to be inconsistent. Mere access to a directory of virus samples, with either Windows Explorer or the "File|SaveAs" dialogue, brings up a number of alerts, but the alerts identify only half a dozen of the more than sixty samples in that directory. However, the resident scanner seems to scan those files that appear in the visible window: scrolling down the window suddenly pops up more alerts. A full range of tests have not been conducted on the disinfection capabilities of the program, but it did "heal" some clearly uninfected objects, removing the .SHS extension from some old experimental zero length files. Local Support None provided. Support Requirements As noted, updates are problematic. General Notes Recommended for emergency use, since the Free Edition seems to be quite effective. However, problems with updating of signatures and technical support make the overall use of this program questionable. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2002 PCAVG.RVW 20020510