GriSoft AVG Antivirus - part I

by Andrew Cooper

Another antivirus (AV) software that drew my attention is AVG Antivirus from GriSoft. I haven't heard much about it, but every opinion I could collect was positive, so I decided to take a look at it. In my previous review about NOD32 I stated a major criterion I always consider when reviewing AV software, so let's cut to the chase and see what AVG offers.

Installation and Configuration

Well, there were no unpleasant surprises with the installation. Everything was simple, usual and familiar, even trivial. Running the setup program brings up the wizard with the standard set of choices and options and walks you through it with ease, no matter how skilled you are. One trifling drawback, however, is that people who like to configure their software during installation will not be able to alter all the settings they want and will have to configure them later from the program settings dialog. If that's an issue for you, I'd recommend you try NOD32, which has a setup program with several installation config levels.

A very pleasant surprise was discovering that AVG features separate plugins for Eudora, The Bat and Microsoft Outlook, which can be installed separately or together. This provides a safer email check and conserves system resources by removing unnecessary program modules.



After the program installs, the first screen you see is AVG's main interface. Immediately your attention is drawn to Test Manager where you can create, modify and run various testing, scanning and virus removal tasks. This is a bit surprising, because typically the first screen you see after an install is the Control Center where the program's components and settings can be examined, reviewed and modified.



I think AVG has a strange interface that's not easy to use or understand. The main window contains one big tree view in which all program functions and settings are organized hierarchically as nodes. It would be nice, and probably more usable, if there were not such an abundance of settings and functions, because the tree itself is gigantic and when multiple nodes are expanded (and they undoubtedly will be expanded because any activity you want to perform requires an open node), it is often hard to navigate even when the program window is 1024x768. There is an alternate interface that you can choose, but a lot of the settings for tests are not accessible and those that are can only be accessed from the menu.



Despite these shortcomings, I found Basic Interface user-friendly (certainly for rookie users), but I think AVG's developers should have taken better care of advanced users. This is disappointing because AVG's functionality is very good. It is easy to create a number of tests, which quickly can be run without much effort.

Continue to Part II