Avast Free Antivirus For Mac

There are plenty to choose from, and some, like Avast Free Antivirus 2015, are completely free. With this edition, Avast adds a network protection scan that finds any problems with your home router's security.The user interface hasn't changed much since last year. Oh, the colors are slightly different, but it still features four big panels for fast access to your favorite security components and a line of buttons down the left side to access everything else.
Out of the box, the four quick-access panels link to Browser Cleanup, Home Network Security, Software Update, and Secure Line VPN. A menu link in each panel lets you change that panel's association to any of 13 security components. I would recommend swapping in one of the system-scan choices.


Scan Choices
In addition to the expected scan for malware, Avast offers three other security-related scans. It can check your installed programs for missing security patches, analyze your router's settings to flag security problems, and check for performance issues. Clicking Smart Scan runs all four scans in sequence. That's handy! I'll go into more detail about the additional scans later on.
A full scan of my standard test system took 32 minutes, just a little above the current average of 27 minutes. With some products, a repeat scan runs extremely quickly. Trend Micro Antivirus+ 2015, for example, managed a second scan in less than a minute. Avast's repeat scan still took 23 minutes, but that's some improvement.

Real-time Protection
For some antivirus products, the minimal file access that occurs when Windows Explorer displays the filename is sufficient to trigger real-time protection. Avast waits until just before a program executes to run a real-time scan. In testing, it wiped out almost 80 percent of my malware samples immediately on launch.
Avast detected most of the remaining samples at some point as they attempted to install and run. In a couple of cases, it activated a powerful analysis tool called DeepScreen. Avast also invoked DeepScreen to make sure that a couple of my malware-testing programs weren't themselves malicious.
In one case, fortunately the last sample I tested, Avast requested a boot time scan for complete cleanup. That scan took almost an hour, and required my attention every so often to make decisions about the disposition of particular malware traces. You can launch a boot time scan at will, if you suspect the regular scan has missed something.
One way or another, Avast detected 93 percent of my samples, the same as F-Secure Anti-Virus 2015. However, because Avast allowed installation of some executable malware traces, its final score came out to 9.0 points, while F-Secure managed 9.3. The absolute winner among products tested with this sample set is Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015), which earned 10 of 10 possible points.

Avast Free Antivirus 2015 Malware Blocking Chart
Avast's previous edition was among the first products exposed to my malicious URL blocking test. For many, many months, its 79 percent blocking rate stood as the very best score in this test. More recently, several products have surpassed that score. At present, McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2015, with 85 percent blocking, is at the top. The current edition of Avast blocked 72 percent of the malicious downloads, which is still quite good.