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Free antivirus apps part 5: Antivir

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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antivir.jpgAntivir is the last free antivirus we’ll cover in this five part series. The first thing you notice when you install Antivir is that it randomly generates a serial number to “protect” you when updating it. Even though Antivir is free this license is prolonged every four weeks and Avira, the developer, encourages you to switch to the paid premium version.

Even though it’s very easy to create scheduled tasks in Antivir, the program is always in autoscan and will pick up threats for you automatically. You’ll soon realize that Antivir’s warning message pop ups all too frequently, and even though that’s slightly annoying it also proves that the antivirus is doing its work. When it picks something up, Antivir will ask you whether you want to keep it, move to quarantine, delete or ignore. If you’re not sure, you can click on “virus information” and check out the virus database to get more information on the said malware.

Let’s move on to Antivir’s scanning performances. With a mere 16 MBs of memory used, Antivir is the lightest in our selection of free antivirus. You can scan specific areas of your PC but we suggest instead using manual selection to pick out the main drives on your PC. The scan took nearly an hour and analyzed more than 160,000 objects. It came up with 3 warnings and 2 identified worms. Antivir performs well but users might be annoyed by the recurring pop-up warning message and the fact that you need to re-register every four weeks.

Antivir test results:

  • Uses 16 MB of memory
  • Full scan time: 0:59:54
  • Scanned objects: 166,550
  • Automatic scan at startup
  • Randomly generated serial protects your copy
  • Scan is always active
  • Online virus database
  • Intuitive scan scheduler

Free antivirus apps part 1: AVG

Free antivirus apps part 2: Avast! Home

Free antivirus apps part 3: Clamwin

Free antivirus apps part 4: Active Virus Shield

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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