14 DAY TRIAL // A few months ago, AVG updated all its products to the 2015 version, including its 3-piece antivirus software lineup. For this review we're taking a look at AVG AntiVirus Free 2015, which comes with a new interface and a very important new feature designed for efficient malware protection: outbreak detection.
The free edition of the AVG AntiVirus 2015 includes an av engine for viruses, spyware, Trojans, worms, rootkits, dialers and other types of malware, a link protection module that scans web links (including those from Facebook and Twitter), along with a file shredder that permanently deletes data from the computer to make sure it cannot be recovered by unauthorized persons or organizations using specialized software.
If you're looking forward to additional features, feel free to try AVG Antivirus 2015 which adds email protection, an online shield, and a data safe. Lastly, AVG Internet Security has the most complete package out of the three, finishing it off with an anti-spam component and enhanced firewall made to block hackers.
New interface, same features
When looking back at AVG AntiVirus Free 2014, it's obvious that the 2015 edition's interface has received a makeover, which reminded us of rival antivirus developers (I'm looking at you, Bitdefender). Fortunately for those already familiarized with AVG, the structure that didn't require improvements in the first place remains the same.
If you closely observe all five main components encircled in the main application window, you'll notice some differences: full green circles mean that the corresponding module is properly working, partial green means there are still ways to enhance it, while greyed out circles mean that a component is either inactive or not installed. Since all three av products from AVG lineup share the same interface, the free edition doesn't hide the non-existing components, so the only full green module you get is the identity one, which focuses on software behavioral analysis.
Each module can be easily enabled or disabled with one click. This includes the real-time safeguard against incoming malware, web link scanner, software behavioral analysis, along with the email scanner. It's possible to configure advanced settings for each tool, such as disabling user confirmation for threat removal, deactivating reports for potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) and spyware, using heuristics, deep scanning mode, as well as including the boot sector of removable media when it comes to the real-time guard.
AVG can verify the entire computer for malware activity, custom drives, files or folders via the main app window or Windows Explorer shell extension, or run a scan that targets only rootkits. Compared to a lot of antivirus solutions we've come across, the beauty of AVG is that it can run multiple and different scanning modes in parallel.
Moreover, you can schedule scans to run frequently, at an exact time, or at system startup. As mentioned in the previous review for AVG, the free edition cannot run more than one scheduled task.
New feature: cloud-based outbreak detection
Although AVG didn't focus on bringing new UI components to the table (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), it prepared something more important for the 2015 edition: a cloud-assisted outbreak detection feature designed to protect computers against zero-day threats. This isn't new to the av community, but it's new to AVG. Since antivirus developers are human too, they need some time to create virus signatures for the freshest malware agents.
“Thanks to the cloud, your AVG copy will automatically detect, block and quarantine the most recent malware based on behavioral analysis, without having to wait for a classical virus signature update.”
We usually test the performance of an antivirus product when it comes to malware detection, scan speed, and resources consumption. For AVG AntiVirus Free 2015, we wanted to be a little more specific, though, so we evaluated cloud-based outbreak detection. We managed to get ahold of 114 zero-day malware-infected files. The real-time guard didn't react when extracting the files from a password-protected archive, opening their folder, selecting the files, or opening the files, which was rather disappointing. However, after a contextual scan that finished instantly, AVG detected and eliminated 113 files out of the 114, which is an almost perfect result (granted, 114 is a low number).
As for our "classical" test, we submitted 8,502 virus samples to a scan (not zero-day threats) and applied default settings. AVG detected 8,310 files as malware, which results in almost 98% malware detection ratio. CPU and RAM consumption was minimal.
The Good
Outbreak detection is a new feature that allows AVG to detect, block and quarantine malware agents on the fly via cloud assistance, without having to wait for a classical virus signature update.
AVG delivered excellent results in our tests: 113/114 detected zero-day threats, and 98% malware detection ratio for non-zero-day threats (total of 8,502 virus sample files).
The Bad
As with most antivirus software developers, the obvious issue with the free edition is that it contains a lot of "useless" components that can only be put to good use when upgrading to the non-free AVG antivirus products. Plus, it shows messages that constantly remind you to upgrade or check out other types of software made by AVG.
The Truth
NOTE: You can also check out our previous reviews for AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 and AVG Free Edition 2011.
