AVG Anti-Virus 2013 Review

In the antivirus market, it's hard to overstate how much reputation matters. If you produce a product that is substandard and full of holes, it's almost impossible to recover from that reputation. AVG Technologies, creators of AVG Anti-Virus, is widely hailed as a competent, proficient antivirus solution.

AVG's signature software employs several layers of protection. The first layer, of course, is its antivirus engine. This portion of the software scans your files and compares them with a known threat database. This is a long-held standard in the antivirus industry; it's effective but not always comprehensive. To combat this problem, AVG collects real-time infection data from customers who have opted to share zero-day data. This way, malware infects as few users as possible.

Another layer of protection AVG provides is its social networking shield. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others have become instrumental for consuming and sharing content. Unfortunately, you can't trust every link you see on social networks. The AVG Social Networking Protection prevents you from following a sleazy link to the wrong internet neighborhood.

AVG Anti-Virus leaves a light footprint on your system resources. It does this by waiting for your computer to become idle before it tries to perform a deep system scan. Furthermore, it knows which files it's scanned before and skips over them if there has been no change to the file since the last scan. This effectively cuts the scan down to a fraction of the time it would take to scan your entire drive.

An area in which AVG excels, which many lesser antivirus solutions omit completely, is protection for online gaming. Games like "World of Warcraft," "Star Wars: The Old Republic" online and more all store massive amounts of private data, both on their servers and on your computer. AVG protects this data from the actual villains that troll Azeroth.

AVG Anti-Virus is an effective antivirus solution that possesses both a robust feature set and an intuitive interface. The company maintains one of the best threat databases in the industry. We particularly like its zero-day infection system. AVG understands all the complex threats that your computer faces in today's rapidly changing online world, and it shows.