avast! 4 Professional Edition Review

Avast 4 Professional Edition by Alwil Software safeguards your PC and home network with multi-level security shields that effectively block virus attacks, spyware infections and hacker intrusions. Avast 4 Pro safeguards you against all types of online threats and with its highly customisable firewall, it serves rock-solid protection for all your online activities.

Installation and First Start

The application installs in just a couple of minutes and, of course, a free 60-day trial is available for those wanting to take a test drive before buying.

Even though Avast Pro isn't exceptionally quick at startup, we appreciate its boot-time scan facility that runs thorough file checks after you first restart your PC after Avast installation. Running boot-time scan can save you a great deal of trouble when installing Avast on an already infected machine, because some viruses might block successful installation of the antivirus software and it's vital for a safe installation to remove viruses before they are loaded into computer's memory during Windows start.

When the boot-time scan completes, Windows continues to load normally and the avast! resident shield is loaded into memory. The resident shield protects you at all times whatever you do at the computer. When you download files, run executables or open possibly harmful documents, Avast scans all of that on-the-fly and the real-time resident shield blocks threats automatically. There's no need of manually scanning of each individual file or folder you open - avast! does the job for you in the background serving you with the real-time protection on a continuous basis.

User Interface

Avast antivirus user interface might look a bit confusing for users who aren't familiar with similar programmes by ALWIL Software. However, after a couple of minutes even non-experienced customers shouldn't have any problems finding the options they are looking for and running basic tasks. Good news is that avast! offers a large selection of skins you can download for free to replace the default look-and-feel.

Virus Detection Performance

Avast Professional's Guard Shield scans all incoming Internet traffic, files you download and open, programmes you run, instant messages you receive and emails you read. Every time an email is downloaded to your mailbox, avast! scans attachments and URLs included in the message for threats and if a virus or phishing attempt is detected the message is automatically blocked.

Similarly, with regard to files you download from P2P networks or other sources - every archive file or executable file is scanned for viruses prior making it available to you. E.g. if you download a file from the Internet and save it to disk, it will be automatically scanned when download finishes. Until the file is fully scanned and marked safe, it won't be visible in the folder hierarchy. The scan takes anywhere from one to a couple of seconds depending on the file size.

With avast! Professional Edition you can run customised scans, schedule system checks to be run automatically and you can even block dangerous URLs from opening.

Updates

Updates are run in a fully automated fashion. Every time a new update is released by ALWIL Software, avast! fetches required files from the central online repository and installs required patches and virus definitions.

This feature helps to save a lot of time you would otherwise spend on manual downloading and applying patches.