Avast Home Edition is an antivirus which works free for the first 60 days. After this period, it requires a free registration key that is e-mailed to you after filling up a simple form on the website.

Avast has a funky media player-like interface. It is highly unusual of an antivirus program to have an option to switch
skins. Though it is nice to have skinnable applications, it's quite unnecessary to use skins without actually adding any real functionality into it.

The scanner does a good job but hogs system processes like well known programs. By default, along with standard real-time protection, you get 1M protection, Network Shield, Web Shield, Internet mail and P2P protection. Each is a unique configurable protection in itself which for a freeware is quite a solid protection offering. Double-clicking on 'a blue globe' in the system tray confusingly launches the 'Program Settings' interface rather than the main interface. Unfortunately, the exclusion list is only applicable during a scan and not for real-time protection.



FOR: Easy to setup, light on the system, multiple protection shields.

AGAINST: Virus exclusion lists don't work with real-time protection, verbose updates.