You can check on the protection state at a glance in the Current Status panel. It offers details about the status of real-time shields, definition updates or the expiration date of the program.
The same real-time shields protect your system, with the menu showing the status and activity for all of them: file system, mail, web, P2P, IM, network, script and behavioral analysis. For each of them, there are graphs displaying the traffic and amount of items and events analyzed, as well as the number of infections detected.Furthermore, protection is also ensured through sandboxing, which is automatic in the free version of the product, browser protection (based on community ratings) or site blocking (lets you specify URLs that should be blocked).
Remote assistance is also present in this menu, allowing desktop sharing between avast! users. This is most useful in situations when you need technical support from a friend. All remote assistance sessions are carried out securely, through the company’s servers. These can be initiated based on an automatically generated code, which has to be provided to the remote party.
Nothing has changed, as far as scan choices are concerned. You can run a quick scan to check the most sensitive areas of the computer (system drive and RAM), a full system scan for a thorough verification, and a custom scan, which lets you choose the areas that should be checked.The Avast offering won’t slow your PC down much. It completed the on-demand scan test in 1 minute, 34 seconds, for second-best in the group; and it finished the on-access test in 4 minutes, 16 seconds, good enough for third-best.
Although configuring security products may seem pretty daunting for the average user, in this case, everything is simple and straightforward. Both beginner users and more advanced ones can handle the settings quite comfortably.
You won’t be put through hardships even if terminology is not familiar, because of the contextual help; additionally, the explanations are easy to comprehend.
The free version of avast! does not feature a firewall or antispam, and the hints are all over the place, as upgrade recommendations are present in most parts of the interface. However, the messages do not hinder in any way the handling of the application.
Handling the application is easy, and you also get remote assistance possibilities, as well as online monitoring of all avast! installations linked to your account.