It also checks your network connections, Instant Messages, webmail and internet browsing. Can check your email, P2P clients like Utorrent or limewire while you are downloading. Also the system overall memory only shot up to about 400mb compared to AVG which would sometimes shoot up to over 500mb with the same settings and while I firefox is up with 3 tabs and one of the sites being flash heavy.I also like the real time virus check that avast offers. Sometimes it is hard to do anything else.With Avast I haven't seen it go beyond 79% and that is while having firefox 3 up with 3 tabs, one of them being a flash heavy tab. So that means that I have a single processor that many anti-virus programs just eat up cpu cycles and pushes it to 100% usage easily. I have a 2.66ghz Intel Celeron Pentium 4. The pros is that it does have a low footprint even when scanning. This means avast wont use your hard drive more than it needs thus making your computer usage alot faster compared to situation when antivirus needs to scan your hard drive when you use it (unless you have good ssd).I have installed avast to more than 6 computers and only one had troubles, but those were hardware related problems (adaptec raid card didnt work well with motherboard).I give 4 because they didn´t give me any real support, even if your software is freeware you should at least be intrested what is wrong with it. When i first started to use avast, norton or f-secure didnt have this feature. So f-secure was just taking my computers juice for nothing.One of my favorite features is avast screensaver which scans your hd:s when computer is on screensaver. Also avast found few trojans that f-secure didn´t found.

F-secure was just terrible (deleted outlooks inbox when it had one virus). Interface can be changed btw.In short Avast! is one of the best antivirus i have used. This review is for 4.8 stable versionEvery antivirus has it´s cons and pro´s, but when you get antivirus for free you can´t really complain things like user interface if it can do what you want.

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