Maximize Your PC Protection With avast! Internet Security 6

April 29, 2011 - PRLog -- After using avast! Internet Security 6 for a month, I have decided to write this review to give some feedbacks from a customer point of view.

Installation

The installation steps are pretty easy and straightforward, you just have to sit back and click on next step when necessary. Avast automatically creates a restore point and download updates from the internet. Before completion, Avast runs a quick scan and requests you to restart the computer to complete the installation process. The whole installation process takes 10 minutes to complete.

After your computer restarts, Avast will ask you to select the appropriate firewall mode for your current network.

Under Firewall settings, you can choose whether your PC is running at home, work or public. The protection increases as the risk increases from home, work to public. According to a test done by PCMag, the avast! intelligent firewall did an outstanding job in blocking and identifying attacks.

User Interface

It looks almost the same with the previous version, but the forward and backward button is removed. It is clean and easy to navigate. You can select the main menu and advance to the sub menu.

New Features

In Avast 6, there are two main new features: AutoSandbox and WebRep. AutoSandbox automatically runs any suspicious program inside the avast! Sandbox when the program is executed to protect your operating system. Don't confuse this feature with Sandbox, another feature that is only available to avast! Pro Antivirus and avast! Internet Security.

Sandbox allows you to run any program in an isolated environment, which is done manually. After you choose a program that you suspect to be infected to run in the virtualized state (Sandbox), you can end the program's process without causing any effect or change to the system. However, I don't really find the Sanbox to be useful as you hardly knew which program is infected and should be run in the Sandbox.

WebRep is another feature that gives users to have a look on a website's reputation ratings. It works as a browser plug-in and displays a button at the toolbar of each browser. Avast gathers votes from users and displays the average rating of a site. You also can vote for any website you want. It is useful for you to refer on a site's reputation, but don't depend too much on it.

Another great feature that I like the most: SafeZone. You can switch to SafeZone when you want to surf or manage sensitive websites such as online transactions and banking. In the virtualized desktop, you don't have to worry of being monitored by spyware or a key-logger.

Other Features

Under Summary tab, you can turn silent/gaming mode on if you don't want any pop-up to display. When you run a full screen application, it turns on automatically. I'm glad that Avast has included this feature that very few anti-virus softwares have it. I used to have an anti-virus software that pop-up when I was gaming, which annoyed me.

Performance

I have tried to run quick scan for a few times and each scan takes roughly 15 minutes to complete, whereas full scan takes around 1 hour to complete. I'm not really impressed with the speed which is just slightly above average. However, the RAM usage is amazingly low where you can hardly feel any difference when you are running several programs. You can minimize the Avast window and let the scan running in the background.

After a quick scan completes, Avast usually recommends you to run boot-time scan to finish the cleanup process. You also can schedule boot-time scan to run when your computer boot on the next time. Boot-time scan is useful to clean any malware before potential malware has a chance to activate. Avast claims that the boot-time scan uses direct hard drive access, which bypasses the OS file system drivers thus able to handle even the most stubborn rootkits. In fact, I have tried the boot-time scan and it detects some malwares that are unable to detect in quick scan mode.

After each scan completes, you can choose to delete, repair, ignore or quarantine an infected file. Avast virus chest works as a container to isolate suspicious files.

Conclusion

In overall, avast! Internet Security 6 does its job in protecting your computer. There is no doubt that Avast works hard to develop new technologies, making themselves to lead the windows security industry. Although there are space of improvement in some features, Avast is still one of the best anti-virus software which is worth to download.

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